


always slipping from my hands

by starsinyourveins



Category: Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt Peter, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, gen but everyone is a little in love with peter because i am a little in love with peter, not too angsty there's a happy ending dont worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-13 15:03:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11762421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsinyourveins/pseuds/starsinyourveins
Summary: This has never happened before. The worst she’s seen of Peter’s injuries have been black-and-blue bruises, split lips, bloody noses.  But something like this – Peter shaking on her floor, burns wrapped around his side – this is serious. On anyone else, this would be a trip to the ER.“I’m sorry,” Peter says. "I'm sorry, MJ, your apartment was closest."(In which Peter looks out for the little guy, and learns how to look out for himself.)





	1. i know this much is true

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-movie, wherein Ned, Michelle, and Aunt May all know Peter's identity. The Shocker has a ridiculous name, but nevertheless somehow becomes a Problem. Everyone is having a crisis (some more than others). Natasha makes a brief appearance because I love her and also Spider Friends (tm) gives me life. 
> 
> TW for burns (not too graphic) and panic attacks. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Peter doesn’t get very good rest anymore.

It used to be that when Peter wasn’t patrolling, or doing calculus homework, or balancing his fragile high school social life, he could fall asleep in seconds. The moment his head hit the pillow, he’d be lights out. It’s one of his more useful skills. He generally has very few hours to sleep, anyway, especially now with all the Not-Avenger Training he’s been doing at their facility, so really, it seems like he should be putting these hours to good use.

But no. It’s a Tuesday. 3 AM. The apartment is dark and quiet. School starts at eight o’ clock tomorrow. And he is not asleep.  

Instead he’s counting the cracks in the ceiling. 

Peter tries closing his eyes again. His spider-sense screams at him. It takes effort to unclench his fists, to forcibly relax the bunched up tension between his shoulder blades. All he can hear are the warning bells going off in his head, and they sound like crumbling cement and feel like crushed ribs. He sees fire on a beach.

He snaps his eyes open.

_I’m in my apartment. Aunt May is asleep in the other room. There’s no danger here._

Somehow, it doesn’t work. He feels so _awake,_ which doesn’t make any sense, since he hasn’t slept more than three hours a night in – God, he doesn’t even know how long. He feels like he does when he hears shouting in an alleyway, or the snap of a lock breaking, chains rattling. The course of adrenaline in his veins right before a fight. 

There’s no fight to be had in his bedroom at 3AM. He tries closing his eyes again, but it takes another hour before his body finally caves in exhaustion and he’s asleep.

 

\---

“Dude,” comes Ned’s voice, “ _Dude.”_

Peter snaps out of it. His spider-hearing had him about a million miles away, or rather, a couple hundred yards, listening to the drip of sink that someone had forgotten to turn off in the math hallway.

“What’s with the thousand yard stare?” Ned is whispering at him. “If you cut off a finger, I don’t think your spider-healing will grow you a new one.” He pauses. “Actually, could it do that?”

Right. He’s in Robotics. Ned is hanging on to his elbow tight like they’re in danger, but the only thing dangerous is the core drill in his hand, or maybe the sheer amount of gel in Flash’s hair across the room.

Peter shakes the feeling off. Unclenches his hand from around the drill.  Carefully does not think of the image of his own face, reflected back at him in murky pipe-water, the feeling of his limbs crushed under a building’s weight. He takes a deep breath, feels his totally unbroken ribs expand, and looks up to see Ned staring at him.  

Ned’s eyebrows are drawn together and creating creases in the middle of his forehead. Peter can feel the worry radiating off of him.

He gulps.  What were they talking about?

“I don’t think my finger would grow back,” Peter says quickly, trying to wipe the look off Ned’s face before the eyebrows get any closer together. He needs to _get it together._ “I’m a fast healer, not a gecko.”

“Gecko?” Ned says. His eyebrows start to look less worried and more confused. Peter breathes an internal sigh of relief. “Are you rebranding? I think the spider thing has already stuck, dude.”

“No, like – you know how gecko tails grow back after getting eaten by predators? I don’t think my healing factor, uh, extends that far.” 

“Oh, yeah,” Ned nods, like this is a perfectly normal conversation for a couple of high schoolers to be having. “Let’s never test that.”

“It’d be a lot harder to rebuild the Death Star with nine fingers,” Peter agrees, thoughtfully. 

Crisis averted. Ned is sufficiently distracted by pondering the extent of his healing capabilities and Star Wars. Peter lets the babble wash over him, soothing the buzz of his senses in his ears. Ned’s hand doesn’t leave his elbow, and Peter lets it ground him. 

_I’m here. I’m right here._

\---  

 

On Friday, Peter takes down one of Toomes’ men. The guy keeps robbing people and places and slinging around a giant, explode-y piece of tech while doing it. He’s been calling himself the Shocker. Of course someone was going to notice _that_ eventually, and take him down. And since someone called the _Shocker_ isn’t exactly Avengers material, Peter follows him in a seedy back alley and does what he does best.  

Watching from a fire escape above, Peter recognizes him as the guy in the bus lot behind the school, from Homecoming night. The one Ned saved him from. Peter swallows, and reminds himself that this guy is small fry compared to Toomes, and yet –  

The fight is more than Peter expects. The moment Peter drops down from above, the man whirls around, gun blasting, and suddenly Peter is thankful that the alley is sitting next to an abandoned building and not a busy apartment complex. The alley becomes a lot less wall and a lot more rubble, and Peter has to move fast to avoid the next shot as well as the tumbling bricks.

“That’s not the way to greet someone,” Peter says, and is rewarded for his quip by another shot directed his way. 

"Spider-Man," the man growls. Peter expects him to say or maybe growl something else, but he doesn't. _Well, Toomes was the head of the operation. It's not like he needed rocket scientists to haul alien weaponry from one city to the next._

"What gave it away?" Peter ducks the rippling purple beam that makes every hair on his body stand on end. "Was it the tights, or the literal spider on my chest?" 

"You're the reason we lost  _everything,"_ the Shocker roars. "We're going to _destroy_ you." 

“Didn’t you get the memo?” Peter taunts, dodging another shot coming his way. “Your boss is in prison. Now you’re just a guy with a fancy gun who terrorizes little old ladies.”

The man shouts at that, lunging forward. Peter knows taunting during a fight is a rookie mistake – _this isn’t one of your comics,_ Natasha keeps telling him, during training, _making them angry isn’t the way to win_ – but he can’t help his mouth, sometimes. It’s harder to hear his raging pulse in his ears when he’s talking right over it.

Peter tries webbing the man’s arm to the wall, the one with the gun, but the guy wrenches out of the way and the next blast disintegrates the rest of the webbing that clung to the gun’s mouth. Peter remains on the fringes, ducking and dodging, Karen’s voice in his ear warning him of falling rubble, but he can’t seem to get close.

The air hums with electricity. It prickles at Peter’s skin under the suit. Peter grits his teeth, and stops aiming for the gun.

He slings webbing at the man’s legs, shouts at Karen to shoot some of the explosive webs at the rubble falling near the Shocker’s head. Peter isn’t sure which one works – the man grunts and then shouts, beginning to fall, arms wildly grasping for a hold. The gun jerks in his hand.

Bright purple light explodes in Peter’s direction. He feels himself move, danger sense firing in his muscles before he can think, but he can’t move quickly enough, not expecting the accidental shot, or it’s direction.

Burning pain laces up his side. A shudder of electricity cuts through his skin, leaving a brief moment of numbness in its wake. In that second of numbness, Peter doesn’t have time to think. He watches the Shocker fall, and slings webbing in his direction, pinning him to the ground, and arm with the gun to the wall. With a thud, his foe is fallen to the ground, wheezing, shouting. Karen’s voice in his ear praises him for his use of the super-strength webbing Stark installed in his suit, and Peter feels a briefest second of swelling victory in his chest. _He won._ Peter pumps his fist in the air –

And then, excruciating pain slices through him. Peter gasps, choking on air, nearly falling to his knees if it weren’t for the adrenaline from the fight that keeps him upright. His hands instinctively go to his side, and he has to tangle his fingers in his suit to keep from pressing his hands to a wound that will only worsen if he touches it.   

God, it hurts. It feels like fire, like his side is engulfed in white-hot embers.

Peter can’t look at it. He doesn’t want to know what kind of injury that electric alien beams leave behind. He doesn’t want to know what something that can break through a million-dollar Stark Industries supersuit could do to a human body. 

“You’ll regret this,” Shocker screeches, still bound to the pavement. “I’m not working alone anymore. Scorpion won’t care if you’re nothing but a small fry hero. He’ll crush you, and then he’ll find everyone you care about, and tear them to pieces– ”

Peter takes a stumbling step forward. He shoots more webbing to the man’s mouth to stop all the growling and shouting and evil-plan-spewing, which is only making his head hurt. Then he shoots some more webbing around what looks like the gun’s controls, rendering them sticky and useless for a couple hours. Better to be safe than sorry.

“Man, is Scorpion the one who gave you your name? Because you guys could use a better marketing team.” It takes effort to get the words out, and they fall flat. So much for Spider-Man’s one-liners.  

“Shocking,” Peter wheezes, because he can’t help himself, “That the Shocker goes down so easy.”

Angry muffled shouting. Peter’s been thinking about that one for days. It doesn’t sound as good as he thought it might out loud.

Police sirens ring down the street, car tires screeching in the distance. That’s Peter’s cue to swing out the scene, wincing at the strain it places on his side, as he flings himself to the closest rooftop that remains out of sight. He smells something burning, like May left the oven on, and realizes it’s not _something_ that’s burnt, it’s him. He gags, coughs, lands on his feet. Stumbles.

“Okay,” he mumbles to himself, sliding to his knees. “Okay, it’s fine, oh, God.” _I’ll heal,_ he reminds himself, buckling over, _I’ll heal, this will go away soon, I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay. I’m not gonna die by someone called The Shocker. I’ll be okay._

Gingerly, he risks a look at his side. Immediately he regrets it.

There are deep electrical burns cut into his skin, leaving angry red streaks of flesh, delving into black. His skin is mottled like rotted fruit. He can’t tear his gaze away.

It burns. He remembers the plane crash, fire on a beach. Peter wrenches his thoughts away and lays flat on his back, the concrete cool against his feverish skin. For a moment Peter misses the days when he just took down regular guys in black with nothing but crowbars at banks and ATMs. The worst injuries he got from them were bruises and cuts. This alien tech sucks.

Peter takes a huge, gasping breath. He runs through his options. Aunt May can’t see this. She only just found out about Spider-man last month. If she sees this, she’ll throw out the suit and ground Peter so hard he’ll never leave the house again.

She can’t see this. The pinched look she gets on her face when she watches the news is bad enough.

Ned is on a plane to a national coding competition with Computer Club. He texted Peter to say he was leaving just a few hours before the fight. It feels like days ago.

That leaves one last person who knows.

 

\---

 

Michelle is watching Netflix and eating ice cream right out of the pint when she hears a thud and then a crash in her bedroom. 

It’s alarming, but less so than it probably should be. Peter has taken to crawling into her bedroom window late at night, all high on adrenaline, still grinning, with bruises running down his legs and mask hair flat on his head. She’s usually awake, anyway, and willing to sit with him as he talks a mile-a-minute about nothing in particular while they watch a movie and he comes down from his high. She’s taken to leaving her window unlocked for him to crawl through.

It’s annoying that she _isn’t_ annoyed by it. It’s just that – Peter is different at 1AM, after taking down guys with crowbars. His eyes are alive, and bright, back a little straighter. And by 6AM, the bruises are usually gone and Michelle knows he’s safe when he leaves in the morning before his Aunt wakes up. 

Secretly, Michelle likes that he comes to her. Likes the way his hands move when he’s all excited and keyed up after a fight. Likes when he inevitably crashes and his eyes droop and he falls asleep with his head lolling on her shoulder. It makes her chest hurt, in a good way. Not that she’d ever tell him.

Maybe this is what having friends is like.   

Michelle puts her ice cream aside when she hears another thud. She gets up off the couch, grabbing the heaviest book off the shelf she can find, because even though she’s gotten used to Peter’s nighttime visits she’s still cautious by nature. Her bedroom is unusually quiet as she approaches her door.

“Peter?” she calls out. There’s no response. “Peter, if you’re trying to scare me, it’s not working. I have both volumes of _The Second Sex_ right here _,_ and I’m pretty sure Simone de Beauvoir would forgive me if they made contact with your head.” 

Nothing. Michelle pushes her door open, tentatively. Her heart jumps in her chest.

There’s a dark, Peter-sized shape on her floor, not moving.

Michelle fumbles for the light, and when it finally flicks on, she is so startled that she drops her book to the floor. The sound makes the Peter-shape flinch.

The shape really is Peter on her floor, window open like usual, but this is not like his usual visit. He is laying on his back, breathing strained and labored, enough that Michelle can hear his soft gasps from the doorway. His mask lays strewn on the carpet, like he tossed it off in a hurry. His hands are clutching his side, fingers tight around the ripped edges of his suit, where Michelle can see – 

Skin isn’t supposed to be that color. The red is so dark under the lights that it almost looks like dried blood, but Michelle can see it’s some kind of burn. The wound stretches from his hip across his side, halfway up his ribcage, deep streaks of blistering, scorched flesh. She can see his chest is heaving from the pain. Her heart drops to the floor.

“Jesus,” she swears, loudly.

Peter’s eyes flutter open, as if he’s just remembered where he is. He starts to sit up, mouth open to say something, and then stops. He hisses through his teeth and lays back down.  

“You can hit me with your book,” Peter wheezes, although every word looks like it hurts. “I think I’d like to be knocked out right now.”

“Christ,” Michelle finishes. “Stop talking.” She moves swiftly to kneel next to him on the carpet. Unconsciously, she reaches to touch his face, hands hovering over his chest, unsure. This close she can see the wound is oozing something, and has to hold back a gag. Rhetorically, she whispers, “God, Peter, what happened to you?”

Peter says, “The Shocker.” And then he starts to _laugh_.

Sometimes, Michelle thinks Peter Parker is going to be the death of her.

This has never happened before. The worst she’s seen of Peter’s injuries have been black-and-blue bruises, split lips, bloody noses. Once, he had broken a couple fingers, which were already wrapped up and almost healed when he arrived at her apartment. But something like this – Peter shaking on her floor, burns wrapped around his side, bubbling and broken skin – this is serious. On anyone else, this would be a trip to the ER.

“I’m sorry,” Peter says, his laughter suddenly stopped. Michelle makes her eyes go back in focus, realizing that Peter has a hand against hers where it is still resting on his face. His eyes are searching hers, where he must see the panic beginning to set in. “I’m sorry, MJ. Your apartment was closest.”

God, Michelle realizes, he _swung_ here, while injured like this. That thought snaps her out of her head. “There’s a first aid kit in the bathroom,” she says, taking her hand off Peter’s face. He makes a soft sound, probably not realizing he’s doing it. She doesn’t want to leave him alone in the room, but she has to find something to clean up the wound.

Peter closes his eyes, face screwed up, and nods. MJ hovers for a second. She’s doesn’t know what kind of burn this is. Even if she did, she doesn’t know where she would start.

Peter must understand her hesitation, because she hears him say, quietly, “Cool water, not iced. Dry towel. Bandages, and, uh, burn ointment if you have it.” He swallows, “Please.” 

She stares at him. Michelle carefully does not think about how he knows this information by heart. Instead she darts out of the room and into her mom’s bathroom, rummaging through drawers and cabinets, looking for what he asks for. She brings everything in the bedroom and sets it by his side.

Peter starts to reach for the water and towel to do it himself, but Michelle pushes his hand away. She lets him direct her with his voice, how to clean the wound, how to peel back the edges of his suit before taking the whole thing carefully off, how to wrap his torso loosely with bandages. Something inside her relaxes when the wound is covered up, despite the stains on the towel next to her, a dark reminder of what is underneath the soft white wrapping.

When she looks up, Peter is still breathing heavy, a sheen of sweat covering his forehead.

 “Painkillers?” She asks. “I think we only have ibuprofen, but maybe – “ 

“They don’t work on me,” Peter says, voice steadier, but not by much. His eyes are screwed shut. “Super metabolism. But I heal fast. I’ll be okay.”

Michelle doesn’t believe him. Before she can call him on his shit, though, she feels a touch at her knuckles, and looks down to see Peter’s hand sliding to the middle of her palm. Michelle doesn’t even think about it before gripping his hand back.  

“I’m sorry,” Peter whispers. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

He keeps saying it, over and over, not really all there, so Michelle has to say, “Shut up.” Peter’s fingers tighten but his mouth snaps closed, too. “Stop that. I’m just glad you’re not dead in a ditch somewhere.”   

She knows it’s too harsh for what she really means, but Peter just laughs, eyes clearer, and says, “Your bedside manner could use some work, maybe.” 

“I’m not your nurse, Parker.”

Peter gestures down at himself with his free hand. “I don’t know, I think you did a good job. Maybe you should consider changing your college plans from journalism to pre-med.” 

Michelle looks down at the bandaging. She realizes in that moment that she’s holding Peter’s hand, while he’s stripped down to his boxers in the middle of her bedroom floor, and her parents aren’t home.

But Peter’s face is washed out and pale from the pain, and there’s a towel stained with blood sitting next to him, and his boxers are Captain America patterned. The whole situation is so ridiculously unromantic that Michelle can’t even feel embarrassed.

Michelle looks at the towel and wonders if Peter will know how to get the stain out. 

“I want you to know that my life has gotten significantly weirder since the whole Spider-man thing,” Michelle tells him absently.  

Peter sighs. “You know, Ned told me the same thing last week.”

 

\---

 

Somehow, they end up not talking about it. Peter texts Aunt May, letting her know where he is, and gets a relieved phone call in response. Michelle lets him sleep on her pull-out couch – _I’m not letting you swing out of here until those burns are gone, Parker –_ and Peter passes out almost immediately, succumbing to the exhaustion that’s been chasing him for weeks.     

He wakes up gasping, smoke and pipe water choking his throat. The nightmare crawls from sleep into reality with him. His heart pounds, and he scrabbles around, trying to figure out where he is, why his ribs hurt, why his legs and arms feel constricted.

It takes him too long to go still and find himself nearly naked on Michelle’s couch. He looks down see himself swathed in bandages and blankets. In a rush, he remembers the night before like it was a fever dream. He remembers the pain, the fight, and holding Michelle’s hand –

Oh, god. Peter feels his face start to burn. He sat there in his Captain America underwear, burnt to a crisp, and _held Michelle’s hand._

His life is a horror movie. Or all a terrible teenage comedy.  

Of course, when his pulse has finally returned to normal, visions of Toomes and the plane no longer burning behind his eyelids, he opens his eyes to find Michelle staring blankly at him from the doorway. He yelps, limbs flailing to grab a blanket, to cover his still tragically unclothed body.

“Take these,” Michelle says, and Peter is whacked in the face by a pair of grey sweats and a giant T-shirt that says _Ask Me About My Gay Feminist Agenda_ on it. Quickly, he slips them on, not wanting to spend any more time embarrassing himself than necessary.

The sweatpants pool around his ankles. He glares at them. When he looks up, Michelle looks somewhere between smug and amused. Not for the first time, Peter curses the few inches that Michelle has on him.  

“You’re lucky I don’t ever wear heels,” she just says, and disappears into the kitchen. Peter sighs even as he gets up to follow her.

Michelle’s apartment is clean and modern looking, all sleek grey counters and simple florescent light fixtures and abstract art hanging from the walls. The kitchen is no different. Peter slides onto one of the black stools at the kitchen island, the room lit by two huge windows, and watches Michelle dig through the refrigerator for orange juice and what looks like two cups of yogurt.  

When she comes back, she pours a glass of juice for Peter, starts to pass him a yogurt, and then hesitates. “I forgot how much you have to eat with your powers,” she says, sighing at the yogurt cup in her hands like it has personally disappointed her. She blows a wisp of hair out of her eyes. “I can’t cook for shit. ”

Peter perks up at that.

“I can do it,” he says. “I’ll make pancakes. Payment for the late-night-bandaging.”

“No way, Peter. You shouldn’t move around too much until you’re fully…”

Michelle trails off, because Peter is lifting his shirt. He tugs the bandages down, and Michelle can see the wound has faded to what just looks like a bad sunburn, only a suggestion of what it looked like last night. Michelle blinks at it.

“Alright, that’s pretty cool,” she admits. Peter lights up, grinning so brightly at the praise that Michelle almost has to look away.    

_Stop that,_ she tells the pounding in her chest.

She waves her hand. “Go on, Rachel Ray. Make me some pancakes.”

Peter bounces to his feet, careful of his side while he moves around the kitchen, trying to find pans and flour and eggs and bowls. He takes his time making the pancakes, taking care with eggshells and adding plenty of chocolate chips.

He ends up with flour all over his hair and up his nose, somehow, but Michelle just laughs at him, and the laughing is so much better than the look she had on her face last night when she found him on her floor.

Peter hums while he shuffles the pan around, flipping pancakes showily and making Michelle shake her head at him. Peter starts laughing, which he realizes is a mistake only when his mostly-healed side twinges. He tries not to show it – covering up his flinch like he’s just reaching to adjust his shirt – but it doesn’t work. Suddenly the smile drops off Michelle’s face. Peter doesn’t like that look, so he turns his back to her to face the stove, but things like body language have never been a deterrent for Michelle.

“What did you dream about?” she asks, out of nowhere.

For a moment, Peter stutters in his movements. He almost drops the next pancake on the kitchen floor, but snags it out of the air just in time, sliding it onto the growing stack.

“What?” he asks nervously, hoping to play dumb.

“Don’t play dumb,” she huffs, and, oh. No luck. He should have known that wouldn’t work. “This morning, when you woke up. You were muttering stuff in your sleep. Was it about what happened last night?” 

“No! No,” Peter waves his hand. “No, it wasn’t. Last night was – it was a rough night. Stuff like that doesn’t happen a lot. Really.”

He pushes a plate of pancakes towards Michelle, hoping that’ll distract her from this conversation, which he _really_ doesn’t want to be having.  

Peter doesn’t want to talk about the dreams he’s been having since Toomes. He hasn’t even told Ned about them. It’s the last thing he wants to think about right now, standing in Michelle’s kitchen, surrounded by morning light and the smell of pancakes and the sound of her laugh. 

He’s been worrying them enough lately. He _can’t_ tell them. He won’t.

“Thanks,” she says, digging her fork into the pile. And then, she continues, “You didn’t answer my question. I asked what you were dreaming about.” 

Peter groans. He rubs a hand over his face. Sometimes he forgets how _nosy_ Michelle can be, even despite her deadpan, uninterested outside. He supposes that’s how Michelle found out about this mess, anyway – picking up on the correspondence between his sudden disappearances and YouTube timestamps, his absences and Ned’s nervous looks at his phone.

“It was nothing,” Peter lies. He can feel her dark brown eyes boring into his back. He scrambles for some kind of excuse, something that’ll keep the worry out of her expression. “After the fight, last night, I was probably just worked up, and somehow it got into my dream. I can’t – I don’t even remember what it was about. Don’t worry about it."

It’s a blatant lie. Peter remembers the dream with such vivid, technicolor clarity that his breath almost catches thinking about it.

He holds his breath and hopes she believes him. Seconds stretch in the silence between them.

Finally, he hears her sigh. “I’ll give you a pass since you’re injured, Parker, but you’re a horrible liar.”  

It’s not a win, just a delay of what’s to come, but Peter breathes a guilty sigh of relief. He sits in the stool next to Michelle with his own stack of pancakes, their elbows less than an inch apart, and digs in.

 

\---

 

“MJ says you got beat up by someone called the Shocker,” Ned says, before even saying hello, when he sees Peter at school Monday morning.

“What? Ned! Do you guys regularly talk about me behind my back?” Peter whines, feeling cornered. He and Ned have the same first period this semester, so there’s no way to duck out of this conversation. “You two are such gossips.”

Ned sighs as they wade through the hallway of busy students. Peter hurries to step into line beside him.

“We wouldn’t have to gossip if you just told us stuff,” he says, which immediately makes Peter feel like shit. Especially because it’s true.

Peter wilts. “It was a rough night,” he admits. Furtively, he glances around to make sure no one is listening, saying quietly, “It was one of Toomes men. He’s working with someone new. But he was the worst of them, I’m pretty sure. The police have him now.”

“What are you two nerds whispering about?” Michelle appears out of nowhere by Ned’s side, and Peter startles so hard he nearly trips over himself.

Peter’s heart pounds. It’s just Michelle, but somehow the suddenness of her appearance set his teeth on edge, every hair on the back of his neck raised. He can see Ned shoot him an odd look out of the corner of his eye, and forces himself to recover quickly, ignoring his roaring pulse.

“Do you have to always sneak up on us like that?” Peter complains, voice shooting for petulant so that Michelle will roll her eyes. It works, because she does. “We were talking about Friday. I was telling him about Toomes’ guy.”

“The one that burnt you like microwave popcorn?” Ned winces at Michelle’s words, but she just shakes her head, eyebrows drawn together. “Haven’t you seen the news? He got out.”

“What?” Peter stills. Somebody grunts and shoves at him for stopping in the middle of the hallway, but he barely processes it. 

“Yeah, he – someone busted him out. It’s all over the news. NYPD is going crazy, think it’s linked to some crime syndicate. They’re saying they’re gonna call the Avengers in on it.”

Peter’s hands tighten on his backpack straps.   

_Scorpion won’t care if you’re nothing but a small fry hero. He’ll crush you, and then he’ll find everyone you care about, and tear them to pieces –_

“Peter?” Ned is peering at him closely, now. He looks worried. “You didn’t know?”

Peter has been avoiding the news ever since the fight with Toomes. He’s been trying not to think about the damage caused by the plane, and he hates how police sirens and images of home fires stick in his head, now, even ones that are completely unrelated to the incident now that the fuss has died down. He should’ve been watching, after the Shocker had been taken into custody, but the sounds…

Peter swallows. If the Shocker is out, that means whoever he’s working for – Scorpio, Scorpion, whatever – has more influence and muscle than Peter thought. Enough to get people calling for the Avengers. And now the Shocker will hold a grudge, for embarrassing him in front of his new boss. Or worse, Scorpion might think he needs to eliminate a growing threat to his business, after spending the resources to bust out Shocker.

_Crush you, and tear them to pieces –_

“No, I didn’t know,” Peter says. 

Michelle opens her mouth to say something, but the bell rings. Their group splits apart, and Peter follows Ned to Macroeconomics in a daze.

\---

Sometimes Peter wishes Ned and Michelle had never found out about this. Or that Michelle wasn’t so damn perceptive. Or that Ned didn’t know him better than anybody. Or, maybe, that Peter had taken Tony’s advice when he’d said Peter was in over his head with this organized crime stuff.

Peter hadn’t believed the Shocker’s angry threats the first time he’d heard them, with the guy webbed to the pavement and knowing that he was about to be locked up for the foreseeable future. But now, Shocker’s out, and he’s pissed, and has some possibly even more terrifying connections with Scorpion, and Peter has no idea if Toomes will leak his identity if the right kind of pressure is applied. 

Hell, Toomes might’ve already spilled what he knows. Peter would have no way to find out.  

That thought haunts him for the rest of the week.

Peter has to be careful. He spends time with Ned and Michelle at school, sits with them in Decathlon meetings and at lunch. But outside of school, Peter ducks their requests to hang out, and is careful to walk or swing home alone.

If Peter’s going to end up a target, he’s not taking them down with him.

He tries his best to keep May safe, but it’s harder. At night, he checks all the locks three times. He takes winding routes back to the apartment, changing them every day, just in case there are people tracking him. He turns the tracker in his suit back on. He keeps his senses alert.

He sleeps even less than before.

That, probably, is his mistake.

\---

“Your form is terrible,” Natasha says. “Your movements are sloppy, your endurance is lacking, and you’re slow.”

Peter is on the floor, because the thought of standing has every bone in his body aching in protest. He’s seriously considering never leaving this particular spot ever again. The mats in the Facility’s workout room are very comfortable, and listening to Natasha rip him a new one is not exactly motivating him to get up and look her in the eye again.

He’s in the suit, even though every time he shows up for training in it Natasha looks somewhat amused. She’s probably got him all figured out already – he thinks she knows at least his age, that he’s from Queens, that he’s enhanced and probably a whole bunch of other stuff, because she’s the freaking _Black Widow_ – but Peter doesn’t want anyone to know more about him than necessary. Especially now, when the people who do know are dangerous enough as it is.

Peter can feel Natasha’s eyes on him. She’s not even breathing hard when she asks, “Why are you here, Peter?”

“What?” he says, lifting his head.

Her face is blank. “You are wasting my time.”

Shame rises to his face. How many Avengers does he have to disappoint before he gets thrown out of the Facility? “No, no,” he says. Peter starts to get up, panting. “No, I’m up, we can start again, I can, I can do better – ugh.”

With a thud, Peter’s back lands on the mat. Natasha stands over him, her heel digging into his chest, keeping him on the ground. He wheezes out a protest, but it hardly makes his past his lips before it disappears into the air in a groan.

“Peter,” she says slowly, as if she is explaining something to child. Peter hates it. She’s never treated him like a kid before, not like Tony. “You are exhausted. You are distracted. You need to rest.”

“I really don’t,” he says. “Can we go again? I’ll be better. I can go again.”

Natasha’s heel digs in a little deeper into his sternum. “You know, I am very good at telling when people are lying to me.”

“I’m not lying,” Peter says, and for a moment, he almost believes himself.

 She stares at him. Her eye color is always changing, Peter has noticed, as is her hair color and style. Today her eyes are a dark brown, hair wavy and blonde. She’s told him that she does a lot of undercover missions trying to clean up the mess SHEILD made – or, rather, the mess Hydra made of SHEILD. Now that she’s a public figure, she has to take more care with her disguises. Her hair hasn’t been red in a long time.

Peter wonders what it’s like, molding yourself into someone new, every other week. How one person can take so much change.

Natasha sighs. She tosses her blonde hair over her shoulder, and takes her foot off Peter’s chest.

“Training can wait until whatever is making you like _this_ ,” she gestures towards all of Peter, “is resolved.”

She turns on her heel, briskly walking away. Peter scrambles to sitting. “Tony has guest rooms set up on nearly every floor,” she says. “Use the remaining time of our session to rest. You should be tired enough to fall asleep despite what is bothering you.”

Peter blinks. Had she planned this? Pushing him to the breaking point of exhaustion so he could rest easier? He thought she had been more brutal today, hitting harder and moving faster than usual, but Peter also assumed that had just been his lack of sleep talking.  

She’s leaving. Peter’s brain comes back online, and he leaps to his feet.

“Wait,” he begs. She pauses by the doorway. “Please, Natasha. I have to train. I can’t even make you break a sweat. If I’m not strong enough – “

To take down the Shocker, or Scorpion, to protect Michelle and Ned and May from people that they shouldn’t have to even be protected from, if it weren’t for Peter – 

Before Peter can even blink, Natasha has disappeared from the doorway, and is right in front of him. He feels his legs go out from underneath him, and in less than thirty seconds of fruitless struggle, Natasha has him on his back on the mat, again. He’d hardly even seen her move.

She gracefully kneels next to him, where he’s wheezing into the mat’s cushioned fabric.

“You may not be strong enough now,” she murmurs, “but you will never be, if you keep pushing yourself like this. Give it time, Peter. Believe me, I would not let you fail.”

Her smile is full of sharp teeth. That’s Natasha’s comforting smile. Peter smiles weakly back at her, and even though she can’t see him do it under the mask, somehow he knows that she can tell it’s there.

But when she leaves the room, Peter can’t help but think, _I can’t wait until then. I’m running out of time._

\---

 

On Wednesday, Peter turns down Ned’s offer to study for their Macro test to follow what he thinks is a lead to an abandoned warehouse. He watches from a nearby building as a couple of guys unload some suspicious-looking packages into the building.

When Peter gets inside, he finds some regular old drug smugglers instead of fancy alien tech producers. It’d be a big deal to Peter before the incident with Toomes, but now, he’s almost disappointed as he knocks their guns away, webs them to the wall, dutifully dumps their incriminating packages all over the floor, and then crawls out before he even hears the familiar echo of police sirens.

 

\---

 

_Peter? Hey, dude, it’s Ned. I feel like I haven’t seen you in awhile, haha. At least, when we’re not doing homework. You’ve been busy with Spider-man stuff, yeah? You should tell me about all your bad-assery when you get the chance. I live for those stories, dude._

_Anyway, Michelle and I are gonna hang out at her place this weekend. You should come! You can take patrol off for one night, right?_

_Talk to you later. Let me know when you get this._

Click.

Peter doesn’t answer the voicemail. He doesn’t know what to say. He’ll tell Ned all about it once it’s all over, and they’re safe.

 

\---

 

Patrolling takes his mind off it. It’s hard to think about anything when you’re whisking through the air, flying between buildings and hundreds of feet off the ground. The rush of air past his suit, the weightlessness of it – he can do anything. He’s motherfucking Spider-Man.

He’s just swung by a group of catcallers (not without kicking one in the shoulder, leaving him sprawled and fuming on the sidewalk) when he hears Karen announce that he has an incoming call from Ned. Peter thinks about declining the call, since Ned’s probably asking to come over. But he hasn’t talked to Ned outside of school in almost a week and a half, and he misses his best friend. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to spend one weekend with them, if he’s careful, if he’s sneaky.

He accepts the call.

“Peter!” Ned’s voice comes through, sounding far away and panicked. “Peter, oh God –”

“What’s going on?” Peter interrupts. His good mood dissipates quickly into cold, hard fear. Ned sounds frantic.

There’s a crash of something in the background of the call, and then lots chaotic noise that makes it difficult to tell what Ned is saying. Peter catches his voice,“… attacking MJ’s place…,” and that’s enough. Peter swings rapidly forward, sending webs flying without pausing to see where he’s suspended from. 

His mind races. Is this it? Did Scorpion finally pay or offer Toomes enough for his identity? All those times Peter thought he was being careful, to keep Ned and Michelle from getting close enough to get caught up in this – maybe he wasn’t being careful enough.

Peter suddenly has an image of Ned, eyes wide, blood streaming from a wound at his forehead, gun pressed against his chest. MJ, a hand squeezing her throat, leaving purpling bruises. God, what if they’re already hurt?

_You need to be better,_ Stark’s voice whispers in his ears.

_Not strong enough,_ whispers Natasha.

_Crush you, and then tear them apart piece by piece,_ Shocker’s voice murmurs.

Peter swings faster. 

In what feels like a matter of seconds but also feels like hours too long, he’s reached Michelle’s building. He climbs the brick side, flings open the window that he knows leads to Michelle’s room – it’s locked, for some reason, but something snaps under Peter’s hand, and then he’s inside.   

His feet hit the ground. His muscles ache. He tries to hone his senses, to pinpoint the danger. His mind is a haze.

“Peter!” He hears Ned shout, close to his ear. He whirls around, and instantly is gripping Ned’s arms, pushing himself in front of him to block him from something, anything.

“Where is it?” Peter demands. Without thinking, he pats Ned down, looking for injury, expecting his hands to come back wet with blood. They don’t. Distantly, he notices how wide Ned’s eyes are. When Ned doesn’t answer quickly enough, he whirls around, eyes scanning the bedroom only to find Michelle standing in the center of the room, holding a box in her hands. 

“Peter – “  

There’s a distant crash. Peter startles, beginning to fall into a fighting stance.

“Are they downstairs?” Peter demands. He stumbles over the words. His voice sounds too-loud and high-pitched in his own ears. He’s breathing heavy from the swinging over. They’re both staring at him, stock-still. “What’s going on?”

Michelle opens her mouth to say something, and stops. Her face is frozen with something Peter can’t read. She shoves the box forward at him.

She says, “Happy birthday, Peter.”

Dumbly, Peter stares at the box.

It takes him a moment to realize that MJ’s laptop is sitting open on her bed, playing a video on YouTube titled _Neighborhood Spider-Man Takes Down Muggers at Subway Station._ Another crash comes from the laptop’s tinny speakers. Other than that, the bedroom is quiet, no messier than normal. There are stacks of books laying against her desk, dirty clothes hastily kicked into a pile near her bed, articles on queer theory only half-highlighted spread on the floor. MJ and Ned are both whole, uninjured, and staring at him with a mixture of regret and concern. Ned has his phone in his hand. He’s holding a gift bag that says _LucasFilms_ on it.  

“Oh,” Peter hears himself say, “Thanks.”

He promptly stops breathing.

\---

 

Peter doesn’t crumple to the floor, but it’s a near thing. Ned and Michelle immediately move forward to catch him, but with the rush of blood in his ears he is only distantly aware of what they’re saying. Ned reaches out to grab his arm and Peter snatches his hand away.

“Don’t,” he gasps, “Too close.” He waves his hands nonsensically until they step back. He struggles to breathe. He makes himself keep standing. Both of their gifts are on the floor, dropped in their haste to get to him.

Peter is so _stupid_. They aren’t in danger. It was just – they were just trying to surprise him for his birthday. They brought him gifts. And here he is, losing his shit in the middle of Michelle’s bedroom, over – over a YouTube video, over a prank call. Peter wants to apologize, or maybe leave, or probably both, but he can’t. He rips off his mask, the cloth suddenly suffocating at his mouth and throat.

All the walls seem far too close. Peter can’t breathe, and it feels like concrete digging into his back, feels like the wind’s been knocked out of him, like a punch in the gut. His ribs are gonna be bruised. He has to keep standing, because the next blow is coming, any second now, and he has to be ready –

“Breathe,” someone says. “Breathe. In, out. C’mon, Peter, c’mon.”  

Then there are two voices, whispering the same things. Peter tries to focus on them. It takes him a long while to remember where he is, to notice that his danger-sense isn’t tingling. Just his normal senses going haywire, like usual. He takes a huge, gasping breath.

“Good,” Michelle is murmuring. She’s standing a careful distance away, fingers twitching like she wants to touch him but can’t. “Do that again. Breathe.”

Peter can follow orders. He takes another breath. Another. He keeps making his lungs expand and waits until his heartbeat almost sounds normal.  The other two are a quiet, silent presence by his side.

Exhaustion rushes through him all at once. He feels like he’s just gone through ten rounds with Natasha. He finally lowers himself down on Michelle’s floor. As if sensing a change, Ned is kneeling by his side in a second, hand at his elbow. He hears rather than sees Michelle sit down in front of him.

“Sorry,” he breathes. He knows he’ll be embarrassed in a few minutes, but right now, he is so tired that he doesn’t care. He shuts his eyes. “Sorry to be a party pooper – “

“ _No_ , Peter,” Ned interrupts him, frantic. “No, I’m sorry. I – _we_ shouldn’t have called you like that. I’m sorry.”

MJ makes a sound in agreement. Peter opens his eyes long enough to see her face where she’s crouched in front of him. Her jaw is tight, eyes crinkled around the edges, like Aunt May when she sees the news headlines the day after one of Spider-Man’s fights. She looks guilty, too. The look is so unlike Michelle that Peter almost shuts his eyes again. Her and Ned’s gazes prickle on the back of his neck. Peter feels cut open, exposed.

When he was laying crushed under concrete, pinned between the rubble, begging for help, at least no one had been around to see him break down.

He’s still so keyed up that he can hear the muscle jump in Michelle’s neck when he starts to stand up. Both her and Ned’s arms grasp him gently and push him back down to the floor.

“Let’s just sit for a second,” Ned says quickly. His parted black hair is disheveled and wispy in front of his eyes. 

Peter sits. He shudders out another breath. Ned leans into his side – or maybe that’s Peter leaning into his. He doesn’t know.

“Hot chocolate,” Michelle blurts. Both the boys look at her. “My mom brought back some expensive stuff from France, or something. Or maybe Switzerland. Wherever they make good chocolate. I’m gonna get some.” She abruptly stands, fast enough that Peter has to keep himself from flinching away. From the weighted look Ned sends him he thinks he only half succeeds.

Michelle leaves the room in a flurry, and Peter loses time between her leaving and going. Ned wraps his arms around him. One of the best things about Ned is how good his hugs are – Peter knows how he’s built, okay, and _lithe_ is a nice way of saying he’s stick-thin and short even with the enhancements given to him by the spider bite – so Ned’s hugs always envelop him completely.  

“Man,” Peter mutters into Ned’s shoulder. It’s muffled by his Hulk hoodie. “Have I ever told you your hugs are legendary?” 

“Only every day,” Ned laughs, and it sounds good. Peter smiles into the fabric. Peter had missed this. Ned clutches him like he’s afraid Peter’s going to try to wriggle out of his grasp and make a break for it. But the squeeze of Ned’s arms and the gentle pressure of his chest is nothing like cold cement and pipe water, or electrical burns, so Peter relaxes into it, patting Ned’s back in some kind of thanks-for-the-hug-bro gesture.

Michelle returns balancing three mugs of steaming hot chocolate on a tray. She doesn’t even blink at Ned hugging the life out of Peter, so Peter just squirms around so that his chest is outward, back leaning against Ned’s side, to take a mug as she sits down.

Through the suit’s enforced material, Peter can’t feel the warmth of the drink, but when he holds it close to his face, hot air blows against his cheeks. Steam curls around his nose. The hot chocolate tastes creamier, chocolatier than the Swiss Miss that May keeps in the pantry. Peter inhales the smell.

They drink in silence for a while, listening to the traffic outside the window. Peter counts the rise and fall of Ned’s chest, keeps a drooping eye on Michelle, who has decided to rest her head against his legs. Their weird pile is warm. Peter hasn’t felt this safe in weeks. He thinks he might be able to fall asleep like this, if it weren’t for the unspoken guilt and embarrassment he has buried in his gut.

“Maybe I should have nervous breakdowns more often,” Peter muses out loud. “This is great.”

MJ shoots him a withering look. 

“Don’t be an asshole,” she says. She jerks a thumb at him. “You scared the shit out of Ned.”

_And me,_ goes unspoken. Peter has gotten a lot better at reading her signals since they’d become friends, and she found out about Spider-man. He knows she’s just worried, covering it up with a flat voice and her mouth pressed in a thin line. 

Peter knows that, but it still rubs him the wrong way. He can’t help the bitterness that leaks into his voice when he says, “Yeah, well, you two scared the shit out of me. Pretending to be in danger? Like – like I don’t put you both in enough danger as it is?”

He has more to say, bubbling up inside him about Shocker and threats and nightmares, but he stops there, because his throat is getting thick, and there’s still a little too much adrenaline in his system. He needs to calm down.

He feels Ned’s arms tighten around him. Michelle’s face softens, some. She reaches for his hand and holds it. There’s a _sorry_ somewhere in that gesture, in the lines of her palm, the grip of her fingers. Peter squeezes her fingers, to let her know he understands.

“You’ve been acting weird recently,” she says quietly. “Jumpier than normal. Avoiding us. Ned thinks you aren’t sleeping. Tell us what’s going on.”

That –

Peter can’t do that. The problem with having this secret, being a superhero, or whatever, is that he doesn’t know how much of the secret to dole out. He doesn’t know how to be honest but not too honest. Because nobody _wants_ to know about how cracked ribs feel, or how it feels to choke on river water, or how swimmy vision after a concussion makes everything look different and too-bright. Nobody wants to know about the nightmares that never really leave. It’s hard to explain that while also remembering the good parts, the best parts. Soaring through New York. Talking to grateful woman after webbing a mugger to an alley wall. Meeting Tony Stark. Having powers, and being able to check the box: _I did something with these today. I made a difference._

Michelle and Ned are waiting for him to say something. They’re waiting for honesty that Peter doesn’t know how to give. Not about this, anyway. But Michelle’s eyes are huge and brown and pretty and worried, and Ned’s arms keep getting tighter.

Peter sighs, and tries. He tugs at the fabric of suit.  “After that night, on the beach, everything is – different,” he attempts. They wait for more, but he doesn’t have the words. 

“Different how?” Ned asks. Then, when he seems to get that Peter doesn’t know how to answer that question, he asks instead, “What happened, after I went offline?”

Peter sighs. He can’t look at either of them, so he stares down into his mug. He doesn’t know how to tell it all. There’s so much. Toomes’ wings, the building’s collapse, the cracked ribs that he can’t get out of his head, the pipe water. And then, the airplane, clinging to the metal for dear life, the turbine, the crash. A beach on fire. Liz’s dad nearly dying. Sitting on top of the roller coaster on Coney Island, feeling simultaneously like he’d made the best and worst decision of his life. Feeling like something had changed.  

Peter doesn’t know how to explain how the thing with Toomes isn’t _going away,_ both in his nightmares and now in real life, and how much that scares him.

“There was a building,” he says, haltingly. “Toomes took out the support beams. It fell on me.” Peter laughs, shakily. “That was just a warm up.” 

Once Peter starts talking, he doesn’t stop. Eventually the words start coming out before he even notices he’s saying them. He tells them all of it, even the parts he didn’t realize he remembered, in the heat of the moment. Like how the plane changed to match the scenery around it, like a chameleon, or wading through flaming rubble to get to Toomes.  

He tells them the whole story about Shocker, how Toomes might have given out his identity to some of the Shocker’s more dangerous connections. And how Peter might be mixed up in a crime organization with access to illegal alien tech and details about his personal life.

Michelle takes his hot chocolate mug from his hands, and only then does he notice they’re shaking. He runs out of words and the room falls quiet.

“Shit,” Michelle whispers, heartfelt.

“I’ve never done anything this big before,” Peter says, feeling hollowed out, like someone took a melon-baller to his insides. “I mean, I don’t regret going after Toomes. But I’d never been that close to…”

He lets them both finish that sentence in their heads. _To dying._ By the queasy look on Michelle’s face, she understands. Ned, however, is looking at him with wide eyes.

“That’s so cool,” Ned breathes. Michelle smacks him upside the head. He yelps. “And traumatic, obviously, and terrible. But also cool.” 

Peter laughs. His hands don’t shake as hard. Michelle hands him back the mug.

“It was pretty cool,” he admits, taking a sip of the hot chocolate. “At least, before the whole, threat to my friends' safety thing.” Peter grins. “But, hey, the Avengers are training me now, so.”

Now they’re both rolling their eyes. “We _know_ ,” Ned says.

“You didn’t leave out _that_ part the first time around,” Michelle says. 

“Just saying,” Peter grins.

“You’ve been ‘just saying’ for weeks. You made it to the big leagues, you have a crush on Widow, we _get_ it.” But they’re all laughing, now. Peter is laughing and he feels some of the tension loosen in his chest.

He watches them laugh – Ned’s full-bodied giggles, and Michelle’s held-back snorts – and feels warmer than he has in weeks. He leans his head into Ned’s shoulder.

He’s really, really missed his best friends.

“We missed you, too,” Ned whispers, and Peter realizes he must have said it out loud. “We – we knew you were avoiding us. That’s why we called you like that, because we knew you’d…” Ned trails off.  Peter flushes with guilt.  _We knew you'd come if we called Spider-man instead of Peter Parker._

“It was shitty of us,” Michelle finishes for Ned. “We didn’t know that you were worried about your identity being leaked, but still, we shouldn’t have done it. Even for your birthday. _Especially_ on your birthday. We were – we were wrong.”

Peter lifts his head. Michelle meets his eyes, steady. 

“But next time,” she continues. “Just tell us, Peter. We would have understood. We would've tried, anyway.”

Peter swallows. He nods, slowly. 

“Okay,” he says, quiet. “Okay.”

Michelle looks at his face for a moment, and then sighs. She puts her mug down.

“Oh, hell,” she says. “I’m not good at this, so you have to tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”

She scooches in close, wrapping her arms around Peter, and part of the way around Ned’s back. Ned presses in closer, so that Peter is curled up between both of them, Michelle’s head pressed into his shoulder, Ned’s arms tight around his waist.

Peter closes his eyes. Michelle’s elbows are digging into his side, and Ned’s grip is almost suffocating. He is trapped between two of the people he cares about most in the world.

He has never felt safer.

 

 


	2. now i've come back again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which things get better for Peter, and then get a lot worse. Natasha and Tony make slightly less brief appearances. The Shocker turns out to be the least of everyone’s worries. Everyone is still having a crisis, but it’s Fine ™ and everyone still gets their happy ending. 
> 
> TW for some violence, blood mention. 
> 
> The art is by me! Fic title and chapter titles from True by Spandau Ballet.

When Michelle has finally had enough hugging for the night and untangles herself from their spot on the floor, both Peter and Ned get up to follow her into the living room, all three unwilling to be more than a few feet apart for any given time. Peter is surprised to find that they’ve decorated. There are a few streamers taped to the wall – red and blue, with some 99 cent plastic Halloween spider decorations hanging below them, because Peter’s friends think they’re funny – and a cake sitting on the counter. It’s chocolate, with _Happy Birthday Peter!_ in blue icing scrawled on the front. It looks homemade.

Peter feels a whole new rush of guilt and fondness rush through him. 

“Happy sweet sixteen, Peter,” Michelle says, before Peter has a chance to spiral again. She gestures at decorations. “Not exactly the Quinceañera I know you were hoping for, but.”

“Where’s my new car?” Peter grins at her. She flips him off, and grabs a knife to start cutting the cake. Ned starts to look nervous as soon as she gets the knife in her hand and ducks back into Michelle’s bedroom. He comes back carrying the gifts they’d brought for his birthday under both arms.

Peter opens Ned’s gift first, because he saw the _LucasFilms_ outside and Peter is attracted to all things nerdy like magnets are attracted to… other magnets. He opens it to find a double box set of the two newest Star Wars movies, and a card with Yoda’s fuzzy green face staring back at him that says _YO-DA BEST!_ in Ned’s big block writing. He smiles at it.

“For movie nights,” Ned explains. “Also, I’ve been thinking, we have three of us now. Our Halloween costume this year could be _amazing._ ”

Peter perks up. “You’re right. We finally have a Princess Leia!” He turns to look at Michelle, who’s approaching the couch with three plates of cake, giant scoops of ice cream dumped on top. He stares up at her, wide and eyes hopeful. “Hey, MJ – “

“Whatever you’re about to ask me, the answer is no.” She drops a spoon in Peter’s lap. “Eat your cake.”

Peter eats his cake.

The first bite in, he’s sure that Ned’s mom made it. It’s way better than anything store bought, chocolatey and rich and Peter thinks it has Oreo chunks in it, which Ned’s mom knows are his favorite. He hums happily and takes another bite.

Ned passes him Michelle’s gift. It’s wrapped in blue paper and has a red bow at the top. The ribbon is curly. Peter sets his cake aside to open it. He is careful with it, trying to peel off the wrapping gently, but Michelle just snorts at him and rips the side anyway to get him to move faster.  

Tearing the rest of the wrapping off, and opening the small box, Peter finds what looks like a little rounded metal square with a hole punched in it. He stares confusedly at it for a moment.

“It’s a Stark KeyFinder,” Michelle explains. “It’s a little Bluetooth tracker that connects with your phone. You’re supposed to use it to find, like, your keys or wallet or whatever, but you told me you’re always losing your backpacks, so.” Michelle shrugs uncomfortably. “I thought it would be helpful.”

Peter looks back at the KeyFinder, tracing his thumb over the Stark Industries logo. “Thanks, you guys,” he says, a little too honestly. Ned grins at him.

Michelle rolls her eyes and ignores the heat rushing her to face. “It was like fifteen bucks, don’t cry over it, jeez.” She nods towards her gift. “Don’t forget the card.” 

Peter picks up the card, which at first glance appears to be a piece of notebook paper folded in half. On the inside is a pencil drawing of the three of them, arms slung over each other’s shoulders. They’re all smiling in the drawing, even Michelle, the little swirls of her curly hair falling over her shoulders, Peter grinning madly in the center, Ned leaning into him. They’re each labeled, with little arrows pointing down – Peter’s says _Spider-kid_ above his head, Ned’s _Chair Guy,_ and Michelle’s _The Only Cool One –_ which makes Ned squawk in protest.

Peter stares at the drawing, and then holds it close to his chest. He swallows around the lump in his throat.

“I’m going to frame this,” he says, seriously. Michelle rolls her eyes again, but her face is still red, too, and she doesn’t say anything sarcastic in return.

                                               

\---

 

When he gets home, May pulls him into a hug, kisses his forehead, and tells him _happy birthday_. She sniffles at him wetly for a while about how he’s growing up too quickly and then orders take-in from his favorite Thai place, as per birthday tradition.

They’re eating it straight out of the box at the dinner table when Peter laughs, long and hard, at one of May’s jokes. She looks a little surprised at the sound, her glasses skewed on her nose.

“What?” Peter asks defensively, when his laughter has dissolved. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m just glad to see you happy again,” May says, smiling. “You’ve been skulking around here like a kicked puppy all week.”

Peter frowns. “I haven’t been _skulking.”_

“You’ve been moping, then,” she says, waving her fork dismissively. “Whatever it is, I’m glad you’re done with it.”

Peter thinks about Shocker, and how he’s still at large. He thinks about how he still can’t turn on the news without the police sirens making his hair stand on end. He thinks about Toomes, locked up somewhere, Peter’s name bouncing around in his scary villainous brain.

Peter takes a deep breath. He’s got his guy in the chair. He’s got Michelle and her willingness to smack people in the head with novels on feminist theory. He’s got Natasha, who’s the scariest person he knows. He’s got Tony, who still calls him _kid_ , but gave him a suit worth a million dollars, and a long-term invite to the most famous superhero team in the world.

“Yeah,” Peter says. “I’m glad, too.”

 

\---

 

Peter shows up to training the next day well rested – wearing the suit, face completely covered by the mask, like usual – and Natasha takes one look at him, and says, “Feeling better?”

Sometimes Peter wonders if Natasha is secretly as super-powered as the rest of the team, or possibly a mind-reader. There’s no way someone like her is completely human. He considers asking Clint the next time he sees him. 

“Definitely,” Peter affirms, and since it’s the truth, Natasha smiles at him. 

She rewards his honesty with a chokehold. It’s a good day.

\---

 

Things are much easier, after that. Peter doesn’t have to try so hard to avoid Ned and Michelle, now that they’re letting him avoid them. They meet up after school sometimes, but Peter stays careful. He takes long, winding routes, and doesn’t approach either of their apartments unless his Spider-man garb is completely stowed away.  

With all the free time, he’s actually able to get caught up on some homework he was lagging behind on. He spends more time in the library after school – safe, public, no TVs playing the news – with Ned and Michelle. His grades start going up, especially now that his nightmares have moved from an every-other-day occurrence to an every-other-week kind of thing. 

Plus, Natasha keeps smiling at him, during training. It’s kind of scary, but also makes Peter feel all warm on the inside.

Michelle taps his arm. Peter looks up at her, startled from his thoughts and his chemistry homework. She has at least ten different articles spread out on the library table in front of her, two different-colored highlighters firmly grasped in one hand, and a pencil stuck behind her ear. 

During one of their hangouts, Peter mentioned to her and Ned how much he hates looking at the news. Michelle, ever the pragmatist, immediately took it upon herself to start monitoring the news for him, which apparently, Peter notices, has delved into research.

“I found some articles on the Scorpion,” Michelle says, gesturing broadly to the papers highlighted in neon green. “He’s mixed up in some crazy stuff. They’ve connected him to drug smuggling, human trafficking, illegal weapons dealership, all sorts of shit, but a lot of it is unconfirmed. Until that thing with the ferry.”

Peter wilts. Another reason for the Scorpion to have it out for him. Although, to be fair, the FBI wasn’t too happy with him for that one, either.

“But things have been quiet from their end,” Ned argues. “The Shocker’s been busted out, yeah, but the Scorpion is still in custody. Plus, no one’s heard anything from the Shocker since his escape.”

“Doesn’t that seem kind of suspicious?” Michelle says, frowning. “I mean, Scorpion must have gotten him out for a reason. It’s not like he did it out of the kindness of his heart.”  

“I’ll start keeping a lookout,” Peter assures her. “I’ll patrol the area we fought last. Maybe he’s just laying low for a while, in his lair somewhere.”

“ _Lair_ ,” Ned repeats, awed. “Dude, your _life_.”

“Dude, I _know_ ,” Peter grins at him. Michelle shuffles her papers like she’s considering moving tables. “I’ll start that tonight. Anyway, Ned, what did you get for number six?”

 

\---

 

Patrol goes about as expected. If anything, it’s quieter than usual. Peter helps a group of tourists with directions. He stops a purse snatcher. The woman that he returns the purse back to thanks him tearfully, informing him it was a Louis Vuitton, whatever that means. When the woman kisses him on the cheek, Peter goes as red under the suit as he is in it, and stutters his way out of the situation.

He waits until it gets dark before returning to the alley where he and Shocker fought. There’s still rubble everywhere, scattered around the street and the mouth of the alley. Peter checks to make sure no one is there, listening intently to his spider sense. The buzz in the middle of his chest is absent, and Karen is quiet in his ear, so he relaxes.

Peter clears away some of the rubble – he doesn’t see many people around this area, but nobody else is cleaning up his mess. Leave the campsite as clean as you found it, and all that. He easily lifts the chunks of brick and stone until the street is completely clear, and wipes his gritty hands on his suit, which of course only smears gray dust everywhere.

He’s surveying his work proudly when he suddenly hears loud voices behind him. Peter springs out of the scene, whisking himself up and up until he’s perched on a nearby roof looking over the dark street. He peers down, ears and eyes straining to catch who the voices belong to.

Disappointingly, it’s just a couple of drunk college kids stumbling around the wrong neighborhood. They’re making a ruckus, hollering some pop tune off-key, belting out half the words wrong. He watches them shuffle drunkenly down the street, lit only by a lonely streetlamp.

Peter shakes his head, ready to swing down and steer them in the right direction, when Karen grabs his attention with her voice in his ear.

 _“My facial recognition program has located a match to the list of persons with relevant criminal history in the nearby area,_ ” Karen says, causing Peter to turn sharply to the other side of the roof, eyes scanning for faces in the street below. _“This man may have a direct link to the whereabouts of the Shocker.”_  

A face pops up in Peter’s vision, spilling data and figures in front of his eyes. A pale face stares back at him from what looks like a mugshot, his eyes dark and hooded. The name _Lonnie Thompson_ appears, joined by a few other names, things like their weight and height and criminal records filling his view.

“We have a list now?” Peter whispers, eyes scanning the information. He hears a car engine cut and some voices below, and starts to move towards them. “When did that happen? Did Tony add that? Because I can handle – “ 

 _“No. The program was last updated by Ned Leeds and Michelle Jones,”_ Karen tells him, throwing Peter off completely. _“I assumed since you last mentioned them as ‘friends’, they were non-threats. Would you like me to bar them from editing the program in the future?”_

Of course. Michelle must have created a list of potential leads from her research, and probably hassled Ned into installing it in the suit’s programming. She can be so _nosy._

Peter forces his smile off his face. It’s time to be serious. “No, it’s fine. You can turn on stealth mode for me now, though.”

 _“Of course, Peter._ ” The world suddenly gets a lot louder. Peter can hear everything, from the college kids’ footsteps disappearing into the distance, to the rumble of voices down in the street below.

“Thanks.” Peter peers over the edge of the roof.

There are three men standing around what looks like a dark van, with the windows all blacked out. The suit zooms in on the face that Peter recognizes from the mugshot Karen showed him, the pale guy named Thompson. There are two others Peter doesn’t know, all carrying guns, hands at their hips and gripping their holsters casually. Peter swallows.

“ – until the transaction is complete,” Peter hears Thompson say. His voice is low, gruff. “We’ll give you the green light when things are cleared out. But we’re not doing it here.”

“The location isn’t the fucking problem,” one of the others growls. “The problem is your little _infestation._ ” 

Peter feels his stomach drop. He has a sinking feeling he knows what – or rather, who – they’re talking about.

“It’s being handled,” Thompson replies. His voice stays even, unruffled despite the posturing of the other man, who has a hand still resting on his gun. His mouth stays in a thin line.

“Handled?” the man echoes, disbelievingly. “Doesn’t fucking look like it. Toomes is right where we want him, and yet _your_ employer – “

“This discussion will be taken elsewhere,” Thompson interrupts severely. His knuckles are white by his sides, a vein popping in his jaw as he says, “Or we’ll take ourselves elsewhere.” He gestures to the van behind him with a jerk of his broad shoulders. The threat in the air is clear.

This only seems to outrage the other man, but he grits his teeth and nods.

“Fine. But once we’re out of here, I want an extensive list of reasons why the risks are worth the benefits. We’re not exactly sticking around for _your_ winning personality.” 

The three of them get into the van, Thompson in the front, and the other two in the back. There’s a flurry of car doors slamming, skidding tire wheels, and then the van is moving.

Peter follows them, staying in the shadows and relying on Karen’s voice in his ear to be sure that they’re still in reachable distance. He has to move quickly to keep up, following the van through dark backstreets and crowded roads, ducking out of sight onto rooftops and trying to keep an eye on street signs to map the route in his head.

He tails them for about an hour before he realizes they’re moving too far out of city for him to follow and get home in time for curfew. Peter clenches his teeth in frustration. He taps the spider on his chest.

He watches the tiny robotic bug whiz out of sight to deliver the Stark Industries tracker. When it comes back, Peter runs his finger down its little robotic spine in thanks, and turns to go home.

 

\---

 

When Peter shows up at Michelle’s window that night, eyes bright with panic, Michelle isn’t all that surprised.

“ _Infestation_?” Michelle repeats, nose scrunched up. “Maybe Ned’s right. These sound like the kind of people who would have evil lairs.”

Peter throws up his hands. “Not the point, MJ. Did you miss the part where I said they have Toomes right where they want him?” 

“No, I heard you, I’m just unimpressed.” Michelle stretches her legs out on the couch, so that they’re resting just under Peter’s knees. “It’s been weeks. If they thought Toomes knew who you were, or if Toomes wanted to give that information away, then he would’ve told them already. This means they’ve got nothing on you.”

“I –” Peter falters, anxious rant completely derailed. “You’re right,” he admits.

“I know,” she says. She flicks on the TV. It bursts to life, filling Michelle’s living room with blue light. 

While Peter is groaning at the sudden brightness, Michelle glances over at him. He’s curled up on her couch, holding a pillow to his chest, wearing one of her hoodies and a pair of bright pink athletic shorts that are far too tight on him. Michelle had thought it would be funny to give him those when he asked to borrow some clothes, but now it takes effort to keep her eyes ahead at the TV and not stare. That spider-bite really gave him some assets, is all she’s saying.

Really, she thinks to herself as she looks him over, she’s just glad he’s here in one piece this time. The Shocker incident is still fresh in her mind – the way he’d looked, shaking on her floor, eyes gone glassy, his blood on those towels she’d had to throw out – and it’s far better to have Peter knocking on her window at midnight looking only moderately panicked rather than half-dead.

“Shit,” he says, jolting upright and startling Michelle out of her thoughts. Peter is staring gloomily at his phone. “It’s almost 1 o’clock. May might just kill me.”

“You told her about that calculus test tomorrow?” Peter nods miserably. “Well, it was nice knowing you, Parker.”

He groans. “I’ll tell her we were studying?”

“If watching Law and Order reruns counted as studying, I’d be at the top of our class.”

Peter is already grabbing his backpack, slinging it over his shoulder. He frowns, tugging on his jeans right over the borrowed shorts in his hurry. Michelle doesn’t stop him. “You _are_ at the top of our class.”

She spreads out her arms. “Then your excuse will work. You’re welcome.”

He laughs, turning to slip on his Converse, which lay abandoned on the floor next to the couch. Michelle watches him slide his shoes on and her eyes catch on his backpack.

“You’re using it?” she says, pointing to the KeyFinder dangling from one of the straps. Peter looks at it, and then perks up.

“Oh, yeah! It kept me from losing my stuff again a few days ago. I just turned on my phone, and it led me to the guy who took it. I don’t think he was expecting Spider-Man to show up and web him to a wall, but, oh well.” Peter grins. “It’s really useful.” 

Because it’s 1AM, and Peter is grinning at her, and wearing her hoodie, she lets a smile rise to her lips. “Good.”

 

\---

 

The next day, they gather in the library, in their usual corner where Peter has checked to see that the security cameras don’t reach, just like Natasha taught him. It’s a little table behind a tall shelf, where the three of them have to cram into a space made for two, knees knocking and arms pressed together.

Ned’s laptop is open, his eyes glued to the screen, where the tracker is blinking steadily on what looks like a map of New York.

“I thought you said they left the city?” Ned says, eyebrows furrowed.

“They did.” Peter leans over, trying to get a better look at the screen. Sure enough, the blinking light is firmly within city bounds. “Or at least, I thought that was where they were going,” Peter amends, puzzled.

“I guess they decided to stick around,” Michelle says.

“What? That doesn’t even make sense! I followed them for, like, more than an hour. I’m sure they were heading out of the city, because I was watching _very_ carefully. Do you know how boring it is to watch other people sit in New York traffic?” Peter mutters, frustration rising in him. He clenches his fists under the table, feeling his knuckles turn white.

God, he just wants this to be _over._ He wants to make sure that Ned and Michelle and May are safe. He wants that asshole Shocker locked up, _again,_ for good this time, somewhere with lots of security and armed guards and no privacy. He wants to be able to not worry about being jumped by Scorpion’s men as Spider-man and never being seen again. He wants –

“Hey,” Ned says, “Look at this. They’ve been stopped here for a while.” He taps his finger against one spot on the screen. With a few clicks of the mouse, Ned zooms in, until the picture starts to get a little clearer. 

“Looks like some kind of warehouse,” Peter says, peering at it.  

“Wait,” Michelle says, leaning over Ned so that he has push into Peter’s side, getting hair in both of their faces. She squints at the numbers underneath the picture on the screen. “I recognize this address.”

She turns and starts ruffling through her bag, pulling out a manila folder marked _CLASSIFIED DO NOT TOUCH_ in angry black Sharpie. Peter and Ned exchange a look.

“Here,” she says, yanking out an article covered in pink highlighter and notes scrawled in the margins. She points at a series of numbers and letters at the beginning of the article, with two lines underneath it for emphasis. “Look. It’s the same place that the NYPD busted a drug smuggling ring three years ago, the one they thought was connected to Scorpion.”  

She’s right. The address and description of the warehouse match perfectly. Peter furrows his eyebrows at the picture.

“Why would they go back there?” Peter wonders aloud. “It seems like a pretty bad idea to return to the scene of your own crime.”

“I –,” Michelle stops. “I’m not sure.”  

“Maybe they’re cleaning up evidence?” Ned suggests, frowning. 

“But Scorpion is already in prison,” Michelle points out. “And it was three years ago.”

Peter shakes his head, already standing up. “Whatever they’re doing, it has something to do with Shocker, and that guy I saw, Thompson. I’m going to go check it out.”

“What, now?” Both Michelle and Ned look up at him, dubious expressions mirrored on both of their faces. “Peter – ”

“It’ll be fine,” he says, impatience rising in him, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. “I’ll stay out of sight.”

Ned closes his computer, and starts putting it away in his bag. Michelle shoves away the manila folder and pushes herself out of her chair. Peter sees what they’re doing and puts up his hands, shaking his head rapidly.

“Whoa, no, you two can’t come with me. Absolutely not.”

“Duh,” Michelle rolls her eyes. “Of course not.” 

“Then why –”

Ned says, “We can’t come with you, but we _can_ go to Michelle’s house and be your guys in the chair.” He pauses and glances nervously at Michelle. “People in the chair. Chairs. Uh –”

“He gets it,” Michelle reassures him, patting Ned on the shoulder. “Anyway, don’t be stupid, Peter. There’s no way we’re letting you go in blind.”

“I wouldn’t be going in blind,” he protests, already feeling like he’s lost this argument, which is a feeling he’s grown accustomed to by now around Michelle. “I have Karen.”

“ _And_ you’ll have us,” Ned shoots back, petulant. “Come on, Peter. We’re a part of this, too.” 

Peter stares at them, wilting under the twin glares. Michelle has that look on her face that she gets when Mr. Johnson tries to interrupt her critique of the last night’s reading in English class, the one that means she’s decided on something and won’t take no for an answer. Ned is clutching his laptop close to his chest, mouth set in a firm line. It’s the most determined Peter has ever seen him.

Peter sighs. He gives in. “Alright, let’s go.”

 

\---

 

The warehouse is much more ominous looking at twilight than the broad daylight in the photo of Michelle’s article. The sun has set, or at least is hidden behind the forest of skyscrapers behind Peter. He stays in the long shadows of the building around him, away from the flickering streetlight, the openness of the silent street. The only sounds are distant traffic and the hum of machinery. 

“Alright, Karen,” Peter murmurs, “Can you patch me through to Ned and Michelle? And let’s keep things on stealth mode for a while.”

Karen says something affirmative in Peter’s ear, and suddenly the world outside the suit gets a lot louder. Everything around him is boosted to surround-sound, but thanks to the suit’s programming, he knows whatever he says will be muffled and quiet to anyone on the outside.  

Ned’s voice is suddenly in his ear. “ _We’re here, Peter. Hey, could you tell MJ that we’re co-chair-people, and that she’s not the boss of me?”_

Michelle says something in the background that makes Ned yelp. It sounds a lot like _shut up, Leeds, or I’ll demote you._ Peter struggles to keep a smile off his face.

“I’m sitting on a roof close to the warehouse, so we need to be _quiet,”_ Peter says pointedly. “Karen, can you give them a visual?”

Ned and Michelle both sober up when Peter assumes what he’s seeing pops up on the computer screen. A quiet falls over two of them, like they’ve just realized what they’re doing.

Peter creeps around the outside of the warehouse, going through the mental checklist in his mind that Natasha once walked him through while they sparred. He checks for all the exits, then security cameras, then guards or any people around. He counts four exits in the warehouse – two double doors, two unblocked windows – and security cameras all around the site. There’s a suspicious lack of people, but Peter stays careful, quiet.

Once Peter has checked the perimeter, he shoulders his backpack, which he still hasn’t stowed away yet. Since he came directly from the library, it has his homework and textbooks and school clothes in it. He doesn’t want all that important stuff to get stolen, or he’ll be behind in his classes for days. It’s not heavy, so Peter keeps it on as he returns to his perch on the roof close by.

“No one is here,” he mutters. “Are you sure this is the right warehouse?”

 _“According to the map, you’re basically sitting right next to the tracker,”_ Ned says. He sounds just as confused as Peter is.

 _“Maybe they just dropped off the car you bugged,”_ Michelle suggests. _“You see any vans around?”_

Peter scans the area, but there aren’t any cars parked that he can see. “Maybe it’s on the inside,” he says. “There’s a garage door on the other side of the building. I’ll web the cameras and go through the window.”  

 _“Roger that,”_ Ned says enthusiastically.

 _“God, you’re a nerd,”_ Michelle says.

The audio feed goes quiet after that. Peter sneaks in close, crawling down the side of the building in the shadows, approaching the other side of the warehouse. When he gets close enough to be able to step into the lights, he aims two shots of webbing at the security cameras closest to the window, covering the lenses completely.

Peter scales the wall up to the window. It takes some effort – the window is locked – but he forces it open, hearing something crack under his hands. He hurries to get inside, feeling exposed in the light, and climbs into the dark warehouse.

Inside, the warehouse is mostly cleared out. Peter blinks a few times as he adjusts to the dark, the echo of his muffled footsteps loud in his ears as he looks around. It reminds him of the SHEILD warehouse, all smooth walls and empty space, except there’s absolutely jack shit in it.

“There’s nothing in here,” Peter mumbles. “Maybe they found the tracker and threw it – “

 _“Peter, two heat signatures are showing up on this feed,”_ Ned interrupts, sounding somewhere between surprised and nervous. Peter whirls around, eyes scanning every which way, looking for something, someone, anything –

Suddenly, Peter feels a sharp tug at the base of his spine, spider-sense shooting through his nerves. He jerks, ducking just under a bright blast that hisses as it passes over his head. Peter falls into a fighting stance, adrenaline crashing through him like a wave.

_“Facial recognition activated. Heat signatures identified as Lonnie Thompson and Herman Schultz.”_

_“Holy shit, the Shocker,”_ Ned says frantically in his ear. _“Was that a shot? Who’s that other guy? Peter?”_

Peter has no breath to answer that, because his eyes have fallen on the two men standing opposite of him, one holding a gun aimed at Peter’s chest.

 

\---

 

Peter can’t take his eyes off the gun. His spider-sense is pulsing painfully, screaming at him to _move, run, hide,_ but he can’t. He makes himself hold still as the two men approach.

He feels Karen deactivate stealth mode without being asked. The foreground comes into focus. If anything, Peter can see the outline of the gun better now, the strange shape of its mouth, the unnatural glow spilling out of it. He swallows.

“Spider-Man. Good to see you,” Thompson says pleasantly, coming to a stop. His hands rest casually in his pockets by his side, but Karen whispers in Peter’s ear that he’s armed under his dark suit jacket. The Shocker stands silently next to him, his usual weapon strapped to his arm, and the new, lit-up gun trained on Peter’s chest.

“Lonnie Thompson. Likewise.” Peter hopes vainly that the name will throw Thompson off, if only for a moment.

Thompson simply smiles, teeth sharp and dangerous in his mouth. His pale face cuts through the dark like a full moon on a cloudless night, like bone through the skin. “I see you’ve done your research.”  

 _“Peter,”_ Ned says in his ear, voice barely above a whisper. _“What’s going on? Peter, you have to get out of there.”_

Peter doesn’t respond. His eyes are still fixed on the Shocker, the gun, and the memory of scorching electrical burns down his torso. 

“Well, you know our names,” Thompson continues, voice a low drawl, “But we don’t know yours. That doesn’t seem fair, does it, Spider-Man?”

“Is this some kind of villainous icebreaker? Are we going to play the Name Game?” Peter says, trying to keep his voice even. “I think I’ll sit out this round.”

While he talks, Peter rapidly runs through the closest exits in his mind. They all seem so far out of reach, and in the open space of the warehouse, there’s nowhere to duck behind and nothing to toss in front of a beam from that gun. Peter’s heart starts to beat rapidly in his chest.

“Participation is mandatory,” Thompson says, the smile growing on his face. “But you’re in luck. Our employer wants you alive to play this game.” 

“Scorpion?” Peter says. Confusion rushes through him. Why would Scorpion need him alive?

 _“Peter, don’t talk to them,”_ Michelle urges in his ear. _“Shut up and focus on getting yourself out. Whatever piece of tech they’re carrying, it’s heat signature is going crazy. It’s something we haven’t seen yet.”_

Peter can tell, just by the energy radiating off of it. He forces his nerves down. He wants to tell her there’s no easy exit, no easy way out. He’s trapped here until he figures out a way to distract them long enough for him to sprint to the window.

But Thompson’s eyes are boring into him, shoulders relaxed. He doesn’t seem easily distracted.

“Ah, not too much research, then,” Thompson is saying. “Scorpion has been helpful, but no.” He claps his hands together. “That’s enough chatter, don’t you think?”

He turns to Shocker, as if asking for input. The Shocker nods slowly, eyes burning with such hatred that it makes Peter’s blood go cold. If looks could kill, he certainly wouldn’t need either of the guns in his hands.

Thompson begins to pull one hand out of his pocket. Peter goes tense, expecting a gun, but Thompson shakes his head and pulls out a small square device. A voice recorder, Peter recognizes. He stares at it.

“We have the audio sample,” Thompson says to Shocker, voice suddenly flat and cold. “Now it’s your turn. Go ahead and redeem yourself.”   

The Shocker takes a step forward, the hatred in his eyes taking on a whole new glint.

“ _Peter, watch – “_ Peter isn’t sure whether it’s Michelle or Ned or says it, but before they can finish, and before Peter can think, a blast is launched his way. Peter starts to move, spider-sense kicking his muscles into gear, but the shot is at point blank, and Peter has nowhere to run.

Silver and white light explodes in Peter’s vision. For an instant, everything goes quiet, and then darkness closes in.

 

\---

 

Ned and Michelle stare at the blank computer screen in dead silence.

“Oh, God,” Ned says. “Oh, _God,_ this is just like last time, except worse, totally, totally worse – “

Michelle’s ears are filled with static. The screen blacked out. She could have just watched Peter die, and she would have no way to know if he was bleeding to death, cold and alone on the warehouse floor, the warehouse she gave him the address to – 

No. She reels herself back from that edge. Thompson said they wanted Peter alive. 

“Ned, calm down,” she says, even though her voice is anything but. Ned snaps his mouth shut in the middle of a breakdown that was steadily rising in intensity and volume. “They want him alive. If we get to him fast enough, he’ll be okay. We just have to figure out where they took him, and call Stark.”

“Okay,” Ned nods, three times fast, _one-two-three._ He takes a deep breath, and turns back to the computer. “Okay. Can you grab my phone? I’m going to try to pull the screen back up and see what we can get on Peter.”

Michelle fishes through Ned’s bag quickly and pulls out his phone. She glances at the screen, where Ned is clicking through windows faster than Michelle can read them.

“His suit is totally offline. Even his tracker is off,” Ned says, shaking his head, eyes glued to the computer. “No visuals, no audio, nothing. It looks like the suit is on total lockdown, so all its functions are turned off.”

Michelle makes a noise of frustration and starts going through Ned’s phone. She finds the right contact, and hits the green call button, putting it on speaker.

The phone has hardly rung when someone picks up.

“ _This had better be good.”_

 

\---

 

Natasha has had undercover missions every week for the past three months. She’s brushed up on at least five different languages that she was already conversational in and begun learning two more. She’s watched three different governments crumble from the inside, one quite literally. She’s flown to eighteen different countries and killed many very, very bad people.

She is also very, very tired.

It’s her day off, which means she can spend it relaxing in the common room of the Facility. She’s spending her evening in comfortable pajama bottoms watching bad reality TV about young, attractive people stuck living together in a house for an indefinite period of time. She enjoys watching them turn on each other. It’s like a modern Lord of the Flies. With less murder, of course.

This is all ruined when Tony comes rushing into the room, covered in oil and grease, and a frantic look on his face.

Tony stops in the middle of the common room. His face is pale like a doctor told him he’s about to lose a limb. Before he even opens his mouth, Natasha knows what this is about.

“Peter,” she says.

“Yeah,” Tony confirms. He sounds unusually desperate. “Nat, the kid’s gone off the grid. You two have your freaky spider-twins bond. Help me out here.”

Before Tony has even finished his plea, she’s already standing.

“As much as I enjoy watching you beg, there’s no need,” she says, breezing by him. “I’ll get my knives.”

 

\---

 

Peter wakes up in a room so dark that for a moment, he’s not sure if he’s woken up at all.

After a second passes he realizes he’s not in a dark room, but his mask is still over his head, Karen’s voice missing from his ear. The video feed is completely dead, the lenses in the suit completely closed or covered by something Peter can’t see, making everything around him stark black.

He starts to sit up, and a sharp pain laces through his chest. He gasps, feeling it ripple through him, out from his core through his arms and legs to his fingertips. His breaths stutter out, uneven, shallow.

Peter lies still for a moment, half out of his mind with the pain. He still can’t see anything. He doesn’t understand why his visual display is offline, why _everything_ seems to be offline. Something in that blast must’ve knocked out the suit’s systems, which doesn’t make any sense – Tony made it, and Tony’s a genius. A certified one – last time Peter visited he had a plaque on the wall of his workshop. Whoever made the gun is intelligent and determined enough to rival Tony.

Thompson wasn’t lying, then. This is bigger than Scorpion.

Peter feels sick.

He debates with himself. If he takes the mask off, he’ll be able to see where he is, and know the extent of his injuries. He might be able to figure out who brought him here, who wants him alive so badly that they’d engineer a gun to knock out his suit instead of just blast him to pieces.

On the other hand, if he takes off the mask, he shows them his face. 

Whoever is smart enough to engineer a gun like the one that hit Peter definitely is smart enough to figure out who he is with just a picture of his face. If Peter takes off the mask, he lets them know his name, lets them know who he is, where he lives. If he takes off his mask, it’s throwing May, Ned, and Michelle directly into the line of fire.

Peter closes his eyes. It’s no darker than when he has them open.

He keeps the mask on, and sinks into the darkness.

 

\---

 

“This is taking too long,” Ned says anxiously, his fingers tapping a furious drum into his computer keyboard. He’s still running through the suit’s programming, green code running across the screen, but nothing is working. It’s unresponsive to everything he tries, as if it’s gone into some kind of last-resort lockdown mode.    

It’s been hours. Since they have no idea where Peter could be, Iron Man and Widow have been forced to look blindly around the city. So far, they’ve turned up nothing, not even a clue to where Peter could be.

Michelle is pacing the floor of her bedroom. It’s freaking Ned out. Michelle doesn’t _pace._ She sits and puts her head down and doesn’t look up until the work is done. But there’s nothing to do but wait for Iron Man and the Black Widow to find something, nothing they can put their minds to but think about all the ways Peter could be hurting or dying or worse – 

Ned forces his thoughts away from that direction. Peter has super powers. He’s seen YouTube videos of Peter lifting cars with his bare hands, swinging through the city like an acrobat. _He’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. He’ll be okay._

He’s repeating this thought in his head over and over again when suddenly he hears Michelle make a triumphant noise.

“Yes!” she says, causing Ned to whirl around in his chair. Michelle is holding her phone close to her face, eyes focused on something on the screen.

“What?” Ned demands. “You can’t possibly be texting right now.”

Michelle turns to look at him. “Peter’s suit is offline, but he was wearing his backpack when he took that blast. And he was facing forward when it hit him. Which means his bag and everything in it is probably intact.”

“So?” Ned exclaims, incredulous. “Who cares if he can do the freaking Spanish homework while he’s been kidnapped? I think he’s got other things to – ”

“No, Ned,” Michelle urges, cutting him off. “It means that he still has the Keyfinder.”

 

\---

 

Natasha, as a rule, does not panic easily. She was taught at a very young age that letting emotions such as that go to your head can impair conductive reasoning, create similar reactions in one’s teammates, and be ultimately self destructive. She knows panic is anything but helpful in a situation like this, especially since Tony seems to be fueling enough of it for the both of them.

She knows that, but she still thinks of Peter’s training sessions, his bright voice, his enthusiasm in taking anything thrown at him, up to and including punches. She thinks of his fierce need to be stronger, better. She thinks of his moral core, unshakeable and strong enough to rival Captain America’s. She thinks of his laugh, the one he gives even when her joke is far too dark to be socially acceptable to tell a teenager.

The idea of losing Peter makes her want to give in to that panic.

She keeps that thought off her face, though, because she’s a goddamn professional. Instead, she listens to Tony’s obsessive rambling.

“Can’t keep himself out of trouble,” Tony is saying. “Goddamn kid thinks he can save all of New York. Why couldn’t he keep giving little old ladies directions and stopping muggings instead of getting mixed up in – whatever the hell is going on right now? Maybe he should graduate high school before he graduates to drug smugglers and illegal weapons dealership.”

“It seems to be a common quality in a hero,” Natasha says, voice calm and measured. “An inability to mind your own business.”

“Yeah, but he’s just a – fuck, his friends are calling again. And what the hell is he doing, getting civilians mixed up in this? I’m going to have a serious talk with the kid after I kick his ass for getting himself in this mess. Yes, Jarvis, I’ll take the call.” 

Tony answers the call and goes quiet to listen to whoever is speaking to him inside the suit. Natasha can barely make out the voices, but she listens closely, and whoever it is isn’t exactly speaking quietly.

A frantic sounding teenage boy is saying something on the other line. _“…the KeyFinder. But it only connects to Peter’s phone, which he didn’t leave with us before he went. But you might have access to it, since it’s from Stark Industries, so –”_

“Kid,” Tony interrupts. “I graduated MIT with an engineering degree when I was seventeen. I own a multibillion dollar _technology_ company. Are you really asking me if I can hack into my own piece of tech, _that I created_?”

There’s a pause on the other end. _“…Yes?”_   Natasha hears.

“Give me five minutes,” Tony says. “You two sit tight. We’re gonna find him.”

 

\---

 

Peter doesn’t know how long it’s been, but he knows he’s moved rooms.

Two arms had wrapped around his elbows and yanked him up off the ground. It’d sent a jolt of fire through his sternum and ribs, but struggling would only have made it worse. He let the two people – guards, henchmen, whatever – drag him through what he thinks was a pair of doors. As he entered the new room, the air smelled different, something sharp and medicinal, something sour.

Now Peter is strapped down to a chair. Or at least, he thinks so. The mask is still pulled tightly over his head, and everything around him is still utterly black.  

He tugs again at the restraints, but it’s useless. Whatever they’re made of, they’re built to withstand his super strength, and Peter isn’t exactly in shape to be ripping anything apart right now. Every movement sends another jolt of pain beneath his skin, and he has to swallow whimpers in his throat.

He loses time. In the dark, unable to move, chest aching, he’s reminded of the fight with Toomes, the feeling of being crushed under a building’s weight. He forgets how to breathe, and then relearns, and then forgets again.  

Desperately, Peter thinks of Aunt May. He’s definitely missed his curfew. She’s probably freaking out, right now, clutching her phone and pouring over the news, looking for any mention of Peter. She’ll be so scared when no news about him shows up.

Out of nowhere, Peter hears footsteps approaching. His danger sense flares up, screaming _bad run hide no no no._ Peter jerks in the restraints, another solar flare of pain coursing through his chest, harshly enough that his gasp escapes into the air before he can catch it.

“Now, don’t hurt yourself,” comes a low, amused voice. “That would defeat the purpose of this entire exercise.”

The voice is too close to Peter’s side. He forces himself to stop fighting the restraints, to keep himself in as little pain as possible so he can get out of here. His muscles shake with the effort of keeping still. He lays motionless against the chair, trying to get air in his lungs.

“Very good,” the voice says, approving. “You’re a good kid, aren’t you, Peter?”

Peter freezes.

“Peter Parker,” the man says, like he’s reading through roll call. “A smart kid, too, right? You go to Midtown High. Must’ve taken a lot of work to get in there.”

His throat is dry, cracked. His mind reels, the sound of his own name echoing through every corner of his brain. Peter rasps, “How – ”

“A smart kid, but, somehow, not smart enough to leave his schoolbag at home when he’s going to get mixed up in things he shouldn’t be.”

Peter’s breath is caught in his throat. His homework, his textbooks – they have his name and school on them. Of course they do. And he brought it with him, because he was too impatient to swing by his apartment, too hurried to get this mess over with, too busy thinking about collecting information to anticipate a trap by the Shocker.

He curses himself. There was no reason to keep the mask on in the first place. He should have taken it off when he could, tried to get a look at his injuries, tried to map out exits and escape strategies. Now his arms are tied down, and he couldn’t take off the mask even if he wanted to.

Peter grits his teeth. Helplessness rises like a wave in him.  

“So you know my full name,” he says, trying to fend off panic. “What are you going to do? Facebook stalk me?”

His voice breaks in the last sentence. Each word feels like another crack in his ribs. Peter clenches his jaw.

A soft laugh echoes near Peter’s ear. He flinches. “No, I think your identity just creates some… incentive.”

Incentive. A chill runs down Peter’s spine.

“Suppose we make a trade,” the voice continues. “My silence, for some of your time.”

 

\---

 

Peter doesn’t agree or refuse to the trade. His answer doesn’t seem to matter very much, anyway. There’s not much of a deal to be had when one side has all the cards in their favor, and the other is tied to a chair.

The first thing the man does is rip off the mask. He then spends the next minutes – or maybe hours – systematically ripping pieces of Peter apart. He takes what look like blood samples in glass vials, cuts skin to watch it knit itself back together, injects him with chemicals that make his eyes and throat sting, stuffs cloth in Peter’s mouth to shut him up. Long cuts trace down his chest like claw marks. It all blends together, endless. Peter watches his blood drip to the floor, counts the puncture wounds climbing up his arm. Most of what the man injects him with, his super-healing rejects completely. That doesn't make it hurt any less. Peter dry heaves, coughs blood, feels his bloodstream dispel the poison from his system, only to be quickly replaced by another. 

At some point, Peter shuts his eyes. He can’t watch any more. The man – dressed in a white lab coat, surgical mask strapped over his face, blonde hair, dark eyes – sticks something in his arm.

Peter’s vision goes fuzzy. He fades in and out of consciousness.

 

\---

 

It’s during one of those fade-ins that he hears it. A distant crash, cursing. Peter tries to open his eyes, but his entire body is heavy, weighed down by – something. Peter doesn’t know. He tries to move, and he can’t remember why he can’t.

He hears the man in the lab coat mutter under his breath. His movements become more frantic. There’s another crash, closer.

“Shit,” the man curses. Peter hears someone come running into the room, heavy footsteps bouncing around Peter’s ears. With every second, the incoming sounds get louder. “What the hell is happening out there? You’re supposed to have the best weaponry in the area. That’s the reason we hired you. Whatever it is, take it down, now!”

“Sir,” the other says. He sounds afraid. Peter can taste his own fear in his mouth, coppery. Every inch of him is alive with pain or sensations that Peter can’t quite place.

“What?” The man explodes. Peter flinches unconsciously when a fist slams on the table near Peter’s head.

“Sir, it’s the Avengers,” the other says, and then the door is bursting open.

Suddenly, the air is full of gunshots, and fire. The room fills with light, the sound of whirring machinery, skin and bone against skin and bone. Peter hears a grunt, and the harsh sound of two bodies hitting the ground, the clatter of scalpel falling from the man’s hand to the floor.

“Well, just two of us,” someone says. “But that should be enough.”

Not someone. Tony’s voice. Peter wants to move towards it, but he’s stuck. He’s stuck. He can't move. He can’t see – he can’t keep his eyes open, and everything hurts, so, so much – 

“Peter,” he hears Natasha’s voice, just above him. He jerks away, somehow in his addled brain mistaking her for the man in the lab coat, and then realizes what he’s done. He opens his mouth to apologize, but can’t get out the words, can’t form them in his head, can’t pull the pieces and sounds together fast enough, can’t get the air in his throat, and he’s choking, he’s –

“Oh, Peter,” her hands are against his face, now, startling him out of his haze for only a moment. They’re warm. He leans into them. “You’re safe now, _zaichik._ You’re safe. You’re okay. Breathe, Peter.”

He wants to disagree, to tell her his whole body is on fire, that he can’t breathe, he doesn’t remember how. But Peter feels his consciousness starting to slip away again, and it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s so, so tired.

 

\---

 

Peter wakes up to a white ceiling and a crick in his neck.

It doesn’t take him long to realize his neck is the least of his problems. The ache in his chest steals his breath away, for a second, it’s so intense. He has to close his eyes and take slow, shallow breaths. He can feel bruises that crawl up and down his arms and legs. He thinks he might have cracked a few ribs. His head pounds.  

He groans. He hears machines beeping. A prick in arm tells him he has an IV in. Is he in a hospital?  

When he opens his eyes again, Ned and Michelle’s faces are just above his.

His heartbeat must spike, because he feels one of them grab the hand not connected to the IV. They lean back a little, giving him space to breathe, and Peter wants to thank them for remembering, but doesn’t have the air in his lungs. He struggles to get around the pain in his torso, his hands white-knuckled at his sides and around the hand.

He fades out, and for a moment, he feels the man in the lab coat above him, pressing a scalpel into his chest. He gasps.

“Easy. Breathe, Peter, c’mon,” Michelle is saying, rubbing circles into his hand with her thumb. Her voice, so unlike his captor’s guttural tone, is what pulls him out of his head. Someone hands him a cup of water. He drinks it, rapidly, trying to get rid of the grit in his throat. When he’s finished the water, he takes a deep, shuddering breath, even though it hurts his ribs.  

 “Oh, hey,” Peter says once his heart rate has settled into a more normal nervous pace, shooting for levity and missing by a mile. “Nurse MJ is back. Good to see you again.”

MJ rolls her eyes, but there’s no heat to it. Ned cracks what could be a smile at her side. They both shift closer.

“You have a real nurse this time, Parker,” she says. “Her name is Emma. You should thank her when you see her for all the shit you just put her through.” 

MJ’s thumb juts into his wrist. Peter hears what she wants to say. _What you put us_ all _through._

Peter winces. “How bad is it?” 

“Two broken ribs, trauma to the sternum, fractured arm, minor concussion, and about a million minor bruises and abrasions,” Michelle says, like she’s reading a grocery list. Her face, however, speaks volumes – her eyebrows are pressed together, and the circles under her eyes are dark. She looks tired. Ned, next to her, looks just as much so.

“Shit,” Peter says. Guilt sweeps through him. He hates that he’s put that look on their faces.

“May just about went nuclear,” Ned says. “Natasha calmed her down, though. She was waiting for you to wake up, but she looked like she needed some sleep, so we took over for a while.”

“She’ll be mad she didn’t get to see me first,” Peter says, sighing, then wincing at the twinge in his chest that it causes.

“You’ve been under for two days, Peter,” Michelle says quietly. “I think she’ll just be glad to see you’re okay.”   

Two days –

“Two days?” Peter exclaims. He lifts his head to look at her, to see if she’s serious. Her eyes bore right into his. “You’re serious. That doesn’t make any sense. This kind of injury – “

Ned interrupts, “They pumped you full of chemicals. It knocked you out and messed with your healing. Temporarily,” he adds hurriedly, when he sees the look on Peter’s face. “The doctors had no idea what kind of drugs that guy put in you. It really scared us.”

Peter closes his eyes. Images flash of bottles, needles, shaking under restraints, things he doesn’t want to think about. Vividly, it all comes back to him – the warehouse, the gun, the dark mask, the man in the lab coat, Tony and Natasha’s arrival. There are so many holes in his memory, he doesn’t know where to start.

“What happened?” Peter asks, quiet. 

Michelle and Ned exchange a glance. Ned shrugs, and Michelle sighs.

“Scorpion wasn’t as high on the food chain as we thought he was,” Michelle explains, voice low. “He was working for someone else. Using the leftovers of Toomes’ business to supply weapons for someone else. All those times we followed his men – when you found Thompson in that alley, and tracked them to the warehouse – that was a trap. They were luring you in for their employer.”

Peter nods, slowly. Of course. It had been too easy, following the trail of articles and addresses. 

“Who?” he asks.

“A ‘scientist’ named David Lowell. That’s the man who,” Michelle swallows, “did _this_ to you.”

Oh.

Suddenly Peter has a name to match to the man in the lab coat. David Lowell. It feels wrong. Peter knows somebody named David from school, a guy who was in his Material Science class last year. He can’t imagine someone like the man in the lab coat, who looked at Peter and saw an experiment, a project, a problem, having a name like that. Or having a name at all.

“It gets more complicated than that, too,” Ned chimes in, pulling Peter back into reality. “Lowell was under orders from some big research company. They were going to use you to perfect some kind of super-healing serum. Natasha didn’t explain it all. SHEILD is taking over it, now.”

“But Lowell was the only one who knew your identity, and he’s in SHEILD custody, too, like Shocker and Thompson,” Michelle says. “It’s all over, Peter. There’s nothing to worry about anymore.”

 _It’s all over._ It takes a moment for those words to sink in. For a moment, Peter feels nothing but overwhelming, terrible relief, flooding through him like a tidal wave. He doesn’t have to worry about Toomes leaking his identity, or the Shocker, or Scorpion or Thompson or _anything._ This big thing, the mess he’s been wrapped up in since Toomes, it’s over. It’s done. It’s in the hands of the Avengers. Of SHEILD.

He lays back his head against the pillow. _All over._ The words echo in his head, but some part of him doesn’t quite believe them.

“Peter?” Ned asks softly. “You okay, dude?”

“Yeah,” Peter says, although he’s not sure if it’s the truth or not. “Yeah, I’m good.”

 

\---

 

Michelle and Ned leave to go get May, who rushes into the room and wraps Peter in her arms so gently that Peter almost wants to cry. She strokes his hair, and doesn’t even yell at him, or mention Spider-Man at all. He guesses that storm will come another time, but for now, she just holds him close and lets him get the shoulder of her cardigan all wet.

There’s a lot of talking to agents and doctors, after that. Peter mostly tunes it out, falling asleep halfway through. His super-healing is working overtime, trying to dispel the drugs from his system and stitch his bones and tissue back together, so he’ll sleep a lot the next few days, the doctors say. He’ll be able to leave the hospital after a couple of nights of inspection. May nods through it all, face focused like she’s going to be quizzed at the end of the conversation. When the doctors finally leave, Peter thanks them, but he’s glad when the room is finally quiet. He’s exhausted by just listening to them talk.

Before he falls asleep, May kisses his forehead, tells him she loves him, and that they’ll have Thai every night for a week when they get home if he wants. Peter falls asleep smiling.

 

\---

 

He does not wake up smiling.

He comes out of the nightmare violently, choking back a scream, which only makes his whole body flare with pain. He scrabbles at the IV and his own chest uselessly for a moment, before realizing where he is, why he’s here.  

When he becomes fully aware of his surroundings, he notices Natasha sitting at the end of his bed, looking at him blankly through the dim lighting of the room. Her hair is straight and brown and her eyes are blue today. He flushes, knowing that she caught him at the edge of a nightmare.

“Where’s May?” he croaks, only then realizing how dry his throat is.

Natasha hands him a cup of water, which he drinks down greedily. She says, “May is getting coffee down the hall. I decided I’d drop by.” 

“To sit and stare at me in the dark while I sleep?” Peter says.

She shrugs. “You’re awake now.”

“Doesn’t make it less creepy,” he mumbles, and she smiles at him, unbothered by his commentary on her apparent creepiness.

Peter remembers, suddenly, Natasha’s hands on his face, her tugging him out of the restraints, the night of his capture. Her voice telling him he was safe. Talking him down in her softest tone. He sets down the cup.

“Thank you,” he says quietly. He works to keep his voice even, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “You and Tony. For coming to get me.”

Natasha tilts her head at him. “Of course, Peter. We would always.” 

 _We would always._ Peter holds those words close, tucks them away to think about later. His chest is warm despite the ache of his damaged sternum.

He leans back into the pillows, eyes already beginning to droop again.

“Although, we cannot take all the credit,” Natasha continues. “Your friends are the only reason we found you so quickly.”

Peter cracks his eyes open. “What?”

“The tracker in your suit was disabled,” she says. “We had no leads to where you were other than your disappearance from the warehouse. The reason we were able to find you at all was because of the KeyFinder on your backpack.”

Surprise rushes through Peter. They only found him because of that little metal charm? Because of a birthday present?

His stomach churns. He can’t even begin to think about what would have happened if they hadn’t been able to find him. If they had taken days to search for him, instead of hours. Peter can’t even imagine what he’d look like now, if it weren’t for that little keychain on his bag. If he’d be here at all.

“Holy shit,” he blurts, the realization hitting him, “MJ saved my life.”

Natasha smiles at him, like this is the outcome she was waiting for from this conversation all along. “Yes, she did. As did the other one.” She stands, moving closer to the head of the bed, brushing a hand through Peter’s hair. “See you soon, Peter. Tony sends his regards.” 

“Nat?”

She pauses by the doorway.

“The SHEILD containment facility,” he says. “There’s no way of getting out, is there?”

He thinks, _We’re all safe now, aren’t we?_  but doesn’t say. He holds his breath in the silence that follows his question.

Natasha, as always, seems to know what he’s thinking. “Peter,” she says, her gaze meeting his. Her eyes glint in the dark. She gives him her sharpest smile. “I’ll be overseeing their containment myself. They’d be dead before they ever got close to any of you.” 

Natasha may lie for a living, but right now, Peter knows she’s telling the truth. Something in his chest loosens. He feels like he shouldn’t be comforted by the look in her eyes, but somehow, he feels safe.

 

\---

 

“You know, it’s all over the news,” Michelle says, biting into a granola a bar from the hospital cafeteria. Peter glances over at her, where she’s sitting by herself in the hospital room chair. Ned has Computer Club today, and can’t come until later, so it’s just her curled up in the cushions next to the bed, legs pulled into her chest. She’s wearing a big sweatshirt that says _Feminist Killjoy_ in big red lettering across the front.

“What is?”

“The bust,” she says. “It’s everywhere. _The Avengers and Spider-Man Team Up to Take Down Illegal Arms Dealers._ I mean, obviously, the rest is classified, because SHEILD is a secretive piece of shit, but yeah. Great press for Spider-Man, is the bright side.”

Peter thinks about that. He guesses it would be a big deal, to play a role in getting several major criminals like Shocker and Thompson locked away. Even if that role was mainly getting kidnapped.  

“Well,” he says, “Couldn’t have done it without my chair-people.”

Michelle looks at him through her hair. She glances the other way, but she’s smiling.

Something about the smile, soft around the edges, eyes bright, must make Peter lose his mind for a second, because he says, “Hey, MJ.”

She turns her head towards him, one eyebrow raised.

“You can chalk this up to painkillers if you want,” he says quickly. “Or, you know, like, trauma after almost dying. I’m not really all here, obviously. Probably still a little out of my mind after all those weird chemicals. And – “

“Get on with it, Parker.” But Michelle is already coming closer, leaning to sit on the edge of the bed, right next to Peter’s side. He feels his face get hot.

“Well, I mean, almost dying makes you have some realizations,” he starts to explain. “And I guess –"

“Yeah, you nerd,” Michelle says, breathless, “I like you a lot, too.”

She shuts him up pretty quickly after that.

 

\---

 

Peter can’t go to school for another few days, but Michelle and Ned come over to his apartment after Decathlon practice. They come bearing ice cream, movies, and a whole lot of popcorn. They also bring his homework to get caught up on, but that’s far less exciting.

They help him settle on the couch, where he rearranges his cast and orders the pillows so he can lay on his back and still see the TV. May comes out to bring him his painkillers, the super-strength ones they use on people like Captain America. Peter feels more comfortable than he has in weeks, eating popcorn by the fistful in a pile of pillows, painkillers dulling his injuries, Michelle’s head resting against his legs, Ned’s voice rising excitedly at the action parts of the movie. 

When he closes his eyes, he still hears a low voice in his ear, and feels a blade at his chest. In his nightmares, he still hears a gun go off, and feels his world go black. Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, he still hears pipe water and feels his ribs cracking under the weight of cement, even though the memory should be faded in the face of everything else. 

But when he opens them, he sees Michelle holding an entire pint of ice cream protectively to her chest, like she thinks someone is going to steal it away. He sees Ned sliding the third Star Trek DVD into the player and getting excited for a movie he’s seen twenty times. He hears May moving in the kitchen, ordering Thai food by the pound. 

Michelle catches his eye and sticks her chocolate-covered tongue out at him just to make him screw up his face at her. She smiles, big and wide and real. 

 _Yeah_ , Peter thinks, _I’m going to be fine._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i borrowed a lot of names from the comics but im p certain none of their characters are accurate or line up with the comic storyline at all so don’t expect a lot of comic book accuracy lmao 
> 
> there’s more action than I expected to write and then it got out of hand but I hope u liked it!! again, written and drawn and edited by me so let me know if you see any mistakes! thank you for all your kind comments and support! <3


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